Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“You think I’m some ninny who wants to do right but keeps goofing. But what you don’t see is, I goof on purpose. I’m not like you: King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe.”

“ Now look,” Ian said. “The Plymouth is slowing down too. Seems he’s set on staying with us.”

“Mess up, I say!” Daphne crowed. “Fall flat on your face! Make every mistake you can think of! Use all the life you’ve got!”

Ian glanced over at her, but he didn’t speak.

“Let’s pass,” Daphne told him.

“Pass?”

“Speed up and pass. This driver’s a turkey.”

He obeyed. He whizzed through a yellow light, leaving the Plymouth behind, while Daphne rolled down her window and squawked out: “Attention! Attention! Lady in the green car! Your date’s been spotted on an FBI’s Most Wanted poster! I repeat!”

“Honestly, Daphne,” Ian said. But he was smiling.

He turned down Waverly Street, pulled up in front of the house, and sat there with the engine running. He said, “Daph?”

“Thanks for the lift,” she told him, and she hopped out.

He watched her cut across the front lawn — her knapsack bouncing, her ragged hair ruffling. The sole of one combat boot was working loose, and at every step she had to swing her left foot unnaturally high off the ground and stamp down hard. It gave her a slapdash, rollicking gait. It made her seem glorious. He was still smiling when he drove away.

* * *

At Prayer Meeting, the church always felt even smaller and cozier than it did ordinarily. It was something to do with the darkness closing in around it, Ian supposed. This was especially true tonight, for he was early and the fluorescent lights had not yet been switched on. He made his way through the rows of dimly gleaming metal chairs. He stepped behind the shop counter and tapped on the office door, which showed a thin line of yellow around the edges.

“Come in,” Reverend Emmett called.

He was sitting in one of the armchairs with his legs stretched out very long and straight. He was thumbing through a hymn pamphlet. “Why, Ian!” he said, smiling, and he rose to his feet in his loose-strung, jerky manner.

Ian said, “Reverend Emmett—”

He probably could have stopped right there. Reverend Emmett looked so crestfallen, all of a sudden; he must have guessed what Ian was about to say.

“It’s not only whether I’d be able to give people answers,” Ian told him. “It’s whether I’d want to. Whether I’d feel right about it.”

Reverend Emmett went on waiting, and Ian knew he should explain further. He should tell him about the sign from God. He should say what the sign had finally recalled to him: Lucy rushing home out of breath, laughing and excited, and his own arrogant certitude that he had an obligation to inform his brother. But that would have opened the way for debate. (When is something philosophical acceptance and when is it dumb passivity? When is something a moral decision and when is it scar tissue?) He wasn’t up to that. He just said, “I’m sorry.”

Reverend Emmett said, “I’m sorry, too.”

“I hope we can still be friends,” Ian told him.

“Yes, of course,” Reverend Emmett said gently.

Out in the main room, Ian lowered himself into a seat and unbuttoned his jacket. His fingers felt weak, as if he’d come through an ordeal. To steady himself, he bowed his head and prayed. He prayed as he almost always did, not forming actual words but picturing instead this spinning green planet safe in the hands of God, with the children and his parents and Ian himself small trusting dots among all the other dots. And the room around him seemed to rustle with prayers from years and years past: Let me get well and Make her love me and Forgive what I have done .

Then Sister Myra arrived with Sister Edna and flipped the light switch, flooding the room with a buzzing glare, and soon afterward others followed and settled themselves noisily. Ian sat among them, at peace, absorbing the cheery sound of their voices and the gaudy, bold, forthright colors of their clothes.

The spring of 1988 was the wettest anyone could remember. It rained nearly every day in May, and all the storm drains overflowed and the gutters ran like rivers and the Bedloes’ roof developed a leak directly above the linen closet. One morning when Daphne went to get a fresh towel she found the whole stack soaked through. Ian called Davidson Roofers, but the man who came said there wasn’t a thing he could do till the weather cleared. Even then they’d have a wait, he said, because half the city had sprung leaks in this downpour. So they kept a saucepan on the top closet shelf with a folded cloth in the bottom to muffle the constant drip, drip. Of course they’d moved the linens elsewhere, but still the upstairs hall smelled of something dank and swampy. Ian said it was him. He said he had mildew of the armpits.

Then along came June, dry as a bone. Only one brief shower fell that entire scorching month, and the yard turned brown and the cat lay stretched on the cool kitchen floor as flat as she could make herself. By that time, though, the Bedloes hardly cared; for Bee had awakened one June morning unable to speak, and two days later she was dead.

Agatha and her husband flew in from California. Thomas came down from New York. Claudia and Macy arrived from Pittsburgh with their two youngest, George and Henry; and their oldest, Abbie, drove up from Charleston. The house was not just full but splitting at the seams. Still, Daphne felt oddly lonesome. Late at night she cruised the dark rooms, stepping over sleeping bags, brushing past a snoring shape on the couch, and she thought, Somebody’s missing . She poured a shot of her grandfather’s whiskey and stood drinking it at the kitchen window, and she thought, It’s Grandma . In all the flurry of arrivals and arrangements, it seemed they had lost track of that.

But after everyone left again, Bee’s absence seemed almost a presence. Doug spent hours shut away in his room. Ian grew broody and distant. Daphne was working for a florist at the moment, and after she closed shop she would often just stay on downtown — grab a bite to eat and then maybe hit a few bars with some friends, go home with someone she hardly knew just to keep occupied. Who could have guessed that Bee would leave such a vacancy? Over the past few years she had seemed to be diminishing, fading into the background. It was Ian who’d appeared to be running things. Now Daphne saw that that wasn’t the case at all. Or maybe it was like those times you experience a physical ailment — stomach trouble, say, and you think, Why, I never realized before that the stomach is the center of the body , and then a headache and you think, No, wait, it’s the head that’s the center …

July was as dry as June, and the city started rationing water. You could sprinkle your lawn only between nine at night and nine in the morning. Ian said fine; he just wouldn’t sprinkle at all. It just wasn’t worth the effort, he said. The grass turned brittle, like paper held close to a candle flame. The hydrangeas wilted and drooped. When Davidson Roofers arrived one morning to hammer overhead, Daphne wondered why they bothered.

Late in August a gentle, pattering rain began one afternoon, and people ran out of their houses and flung open their arms and raised their faces to the sky. Daphne, walking home from the bus stop, thought she knew how plants must feel; her skin received each cool, sweet drop so gratefully. But the rain stopped short ten minutes later as if someone had turned a faucet off, and that was the end of that.

Then summer was over — the hardest summer in history, her grandfather said. (He meant because of Bee’s death, of course. He had probably not even noticed the drought.) But fall was not much wetter, or much more cheerful either.