Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“In that case,” Reverend Emmett said, “we won’t intrude. Let us pray, instead, for all of us. For all of us to know that we can bring our problems to God whenever we feel ready to let go of them.”

He raised his arms and the silence fell, as if he had somehow cast it forth in front of him.

Sister Bertha is a nosy-bones , Ian thought distinctly. And I hate that tomato-soup color she dyes her hair .

After the Benediction, he was the first one out the door. He left behind even Mrs. Jordan, who most likely would want to walk home with him, and he set off at a brisk, angry pace. So the last thing he expected to hear was Reverend Emmett calling his name. “Brother Ian!”

Ian stopped and turned.

The man must have run the whole way. He must have left his flock unattended, his Bible open on the counter, his church lit up and unlocked. But he wasn’t even breathing hard. He approached at a saunter, seemingly absorbed in slipping on a cardigan the same color as the dusk.

“May I tag along?” he asked.

Ian shrugged.

They set off together more slowly.

“Of course, it does come down to whether a person feels ready to let go,” Reverend Emmett said in the most conversational tone.

Ian kicked a Dixie cup out of his path.

“Some people prefer to hug their problems to themselves,” Reverend Emmett said.

Ian wheeled on him, clenching his fists in his pockets. He said, “ This is my life? This is all I get? It’s so settled! It’s so cut and dried! After this there’s no changing! I just lean into the burden of those children forever, is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” Reverend Emmett told him.

“You said that! You said to lean into my burden!”

“But those children will be grown in no time,” Reverend Emmett said. “ They are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness.”

“Okay,” Ian said. “Fine. How much longer till I’m forgiven?”

“No, no. The burden is that you must forgive.”

“Me?” Ian said. He stared at Reverend Emmett. “Forgive who?”

“Why, your brother and his wife, of course.”

Ian said nothing.

Finally Reverend Emmett asked, “Shall we walk on?”

So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow — not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.

It was Agatha who came up with the notion of finding Ian a wife. Agatha was graduating that June; she’d had word she’d been accepted at her first-choice college; she would soon be leaving the family forever. And one night in April she walked into the living room and told the other two, “I’m worried about Ian.”

Thomas and Daphne glanced over at her. (There was a commercial on just then, anyhow.) She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, her tortoiseshell glasses propped on top of her head in a purposeful, no-nonsense manner. “Who will keep him company after we’re gone?” she asked.

“You’re the only one going,” Daphne told her. “He’s still got me and Thomas.”

“Not for long,” Agatha said.

Their eyes slid back to the Late Late Movie.

But they knew she had a point. In a sense, Thomas was already gone. He was a freshman in high school now and he had a whole outside existence — a raft of friends and a girlfriend and an extracurricular schedule so full that he was seldom home for supper. As for Daphne, well, their grandma liked to say that Daphne was eleven going on eighty. She dressed like a tiny old Gypsy — muddled layers of clothing, all tatters and gold thread, purchased on her own at thrift shops — and was generally off in the streets somewhere managing very capably.

“Pretty soon all he’ll have will be Grandma and Grandpa,” Agatha said. “He’ll be taking care of them like always and shopping and driving the car and helping with the housework. What kind of life is that? I think he ought to get married.”

Now she had their attention.

“And since he doesn’t seem to know any women, I think we’ll have to find him one.”

“Miss Pennington,” Daphne said instantly.

“Who?”

“Miss Ariana Pennington, my teacher,” Daphne said.

It was just that easy.

Miss Pennington had been teaching fifth grade for only the past two years, so neither Thomas nor Agatha had had her when they were fifth-graders. Thomas knew her by sight, though. Every boy in the neighborhood knew her by sight. Not even the youngest, it seemed, was immune to her hourglass figure or her mane of extravagant curly brown hair. Agatha, on the other hand, had to be shown who it was they were talking about.

So on a Friday afternoon just before the last bell, when Thomas was supposedly in a Leaders of Tomorrow meeting and Agatha had study hall, they met at the old cracked porcelain water fountain behind Poe High and walked the two blocks to the grade school. Almost no other students were out at this hour, but Thomas greeted by name the few who were — those excused early for dental appointments and such. “Thomas!” they said, and, “Yo, man, what you up to?” Agatha merely stalked on, blank-faced. She wore a bulbous down jacket over a skirt that stopped in the middle of her chunky bare knees — not an outfit any of her classmates would have been caught dead in, but then Agatha never concerned herself with appearances. She was supremely indifferent, impervious, striding on without Thomas until he ran to catch up with her.

At Reese Elementary Thomas took the lead, choosing a side door instead of the main entrance and climbing the stairs two steps at a time. Outside Room 223 he paused, turned toward Agatha, and beckoned.

Through the small window they saw rows of fifth-graders bent over their books. Miss Pennington walked among them, tall and willowy, pausing first at this desk and then at that one to answer questions. You would never take her for a woman of the seventies. In an era when teachers had started wearing pants to work, Miss Pennington wore a silky white blouse and a flaring black skirt cinched tightly at the waist, sheer nylon stockings, and high-heeled patent leather pumps — the sexy, constricting clothes of the fifties. Her hair was shoulder-length and her fingernails were sharp red spears, and her makeup — when she turned as if by instinct and glanced toward the door — was seen to be vivid and expertly applied: deep red lipstick emphasizing her full lips, and plummy rouge and luminous blue eyeshadow. Thomas and Agatha stepped back hastily, out of her line of vision. They looked at each other.

“Well?” Thomas asked.

“She’s kind of … brightly colored, isn’t she?”

“Oh, Agatha, you don’t know anything. She’s gorgeous! Women are supposed to look that way. That’s the type guys dream about.”

“Oh,” Agatha said.

“She’s perfect,” Thomas told her.

“All right,” Agatha said crisply. “Let’s get this thing rolling, then.”

* * *

Daphne told Ian he needed to make an appointment for a parent-teacher conference. “Conference?” Ian said. “ Now what’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything! How come you always think the worst of me? I just want you to talk to my teacher about my homework.”

“What about it?”

“Well, like, are you supposed to help me with it, or let me do it on my own?”

“But I already let you do it on your own. What are you saying, you need help?”