Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

But telling was what he had promised himself he would never do again.

Oh, there were so many different ways you could go wrong. No wonder he loved woodwork! He showed Rafael the cherrywood nightstand he had finished the day before. The drawer glided smoothly, like satin, without a single hitch.

While the other men took their afternoon break, Ian grabbed his jacket and drove off to fetch Daphne from school. He could manage the round trip in just over twenty minutes when everything went on schedule, but of course it seldom did. Today, for instance, he must have left the shop too early. When he parked in front of the school he found he had several minutes to kill, and even longer if Daphne, as usual, came out late or had to run back in for something she’d forgotten. So he cut the engine and stepped from the car. The air was warm and heavy and windy, as if an autumn storm might be brewing. Behind him, another car pulled up. A freckled woman in slacks got out and said, “What, we’re early?”

“So it seems,” Ian said. Then, because he felt foolish just standing around with her, he put his hands in his pockets and ambled toward the building. Scudding clouds glared off the second-floor windows — the art-room windows, Ian recalled, and Miss Dunlap’s world-history windows, although Miss Dunlap must have retired or even died by now. Two boys in track suits jogged toward him on the sidewalk, separated around him, and jogged on. He wondered if they guessed what he was doing here. (“That’s Daphne Bedloe’s uncle; she’s on suspended suspension and has to go home under guard.”) It occurred to him that Daphne would be mortified if anyone she knew caught sight of him. He circled the school, therefore, and kept going. He passed the little snack shop where he and Cicely used to sit all afternoon over a couple of cherry Cokes, and he came to the Methodist church with its stained-glass window full of stern, narrow angels. One of the church’s double doors stood open. Almost without thinking, he climbed the steps and went inside.

No lights were lit, but his eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom. He made out rows of cushioned pews and a carved wooden pulpit up front, with another stained-glass window high in the wall behind it. This one showed Jesus in a white robe, barefoot, holding His hands palm forward at His sides and gazing down at Ian kindly. Ian slid into a pew and rested his elbows on the pew ahead of him. He looked up into Jesus’ face. He said, Would it be possible for me to have some kind of sign?

Nothing fancy. Just something more definite than Reverend Emmett offering a suggestion .

He waited. He let the silence swell and grow.

But then the school bell rang — an extended jangle that reminded him of those key chains made from tiny metal balls — and his concentration was broken. He sighed and stood up. Anyhow, he had probably been presumptuous to ask.

In the doorway, looking out, he saw the first of the school crowd passing. He saw Gideon with a redheaded girl, his arm slung carelessly around her neck so they kept bumping into each other as they walked.

Gideon?

There was no mistaking that veil of blond hair, though, or the hunched, skulking posture. Almost as if this were Ian’s love, not Daphne’s, he felt his heart stop. He saw the redhead crane upward for a kiss and he drew his breath in sharply and stepped back into the shadow of the door.

By the time he reached the car, Daphne was waiting in the front seat. The car’s interior smelled of breath mints and tobacco. “Where’ve you been ?” she squawked as he got in, and he said, “Oh, around.” He started the engine and pulled into the crawl of after-school traffic. “No Gideon?” he asked.

“It’s his day to go to his dad’s.”

“Oh.”

Daphne slid down in her seat and planted both feet on the dashboard. It appeared she was wearing combat boots — the most battered and scuffed he had ever laid eyes on. He hadn’t realized they came that small. Her olive-drab trousers seemed intended for combat too, but the blouse beneath her leather jacket was fragile white gauze with two clusters of silver bells hanging from the ends of the drawstring. Any time she moved, she gave off a faint tinkling sound and the grudging creak of leather. How was it that such an absurd little person managed to touch him so?

He thought of Gideon’s blond head next to the coppery, gleaming head of the girl in the crook of his arm.

Daphne , he should say, there’s something I have to tell you .

But he couldn’t.

He pulled up in front of their house and waited for her to get out, staring blankly through the windshield. To his surprise, he felt a kiss on his cheekbone as light as a petal. “Bye,” she said, and she slipped away and shut the car door behind her. He could almost believe she knew what he had spared her.

One day last summer, while sitting with Honeybunch in the veterinarian’s waiting room, Ian had noticed a particularly sweet-faced golden retriever. “Nice dog,” he had told the owner, and the owner — a middle-aged woman — had smiled and said, “Yes, I’ve had a good number in my day, but this one: this is the dog of my life. You know how that is?”

He knew, all right.

Daphne, he felt, was the child of his life. He wondered if he would ever love a daughter of his own quite so completely.

It was true the older two were easier. In a sense, he even liked them better. Thomas was so merry and winsome, and Agatha had somehow smoothed the corners off that disconcerting style of hers — the bluntness transformed into calm assurance, the aggressive homeliness into an intriguing, black-and-white handsomeness. He enjoyed them the way he would enjoy longtime best friends who found the same things funny or upsetting and didn’t need every last remark explained for them. In fact, you could say they were his only friends. But Daphne was the one who tugged at him most deeply.

And Daphne had always relied on him so, had taken it for granted that he would stand by her no matter what. He still had an acute physical memory of the weight of her infant head resting in the cup of his palm. Even now, sometimes, she would lean against him while they watched TV and artlessly confide her secrets and gossip about her classmates and recount her hair-raising adventures that he had had no inkling of, thank heaven, while she was undergoing them. (She knew the city inside out, and slipped without a thought through neighborhoods that Ian himself avoided.) But if he showed any concern she would say, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you! I should never tell you anything!” And when her friends came over she grew visibly remote from him, referring to him as “my uncle” as if he had no name and rolling her eyes when her girlfriends tried to make small talk or (on occasion) flirt with him. When he said he was off to Prayer Meeting, she told her friends he was “speaking metaphorically.” When he enforced her curfew, she announced she was running away to live with her mother’s people, who — she claimed — were worldly-wise and cosmopolitan and wouldn’t think of making her return to their mansion at the dot of any set time. Ian had laughed, and then felt a deep, sad ache.

That was what Daphne brought out in him, generally. Laughter and an ache.

Reverend Emmett invited him to supper. “Just the two of us,” he said on the phone, “to talk about the matter of your vocation.” Ian gulped, but of course he accepted.

Reverend Emmett warned him that he wasn’t much of a cook (his mother had died the previous fall) and so Ian asked if he could bring something. “Well,” Reverend Emmett said, “you know that cold white sauce that people serve with potato chips?”