Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Well, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Daphne told her. “There’s been a drought, for one thing. I mean, the grass isn’t really our fault. And the swing is probably fine; it’s just that Ian needs to check the porch ceiling-boards that buckled in the floods.”

But she could hear how lame this was sounding — drought and floods both. And to tell the truth, she hadn’t realized about the mess. She looked around the living room (newspapers so outdated they’d turned yellow, dead flowers in a dusty vase, cat fur from the carpet clinging to Stuart’s corduroys) and she felt ashamed. A memory swam back to her of her most recent drop-in visit to the laundromat, during which she had spotted, on one of the folding tables, a hardened mass of Bedloe plaids that some stranger had removed from a washing machine and left to dry in a clump, possibly several days back.

“Also, Ian needs a haircut,” Agatha told her.

“He does? But I gave him a haircut,” Daphne said. (Ian hated barbershops.) “I gave him one just last—”

Oh, Lord, way last summer. All at once she saw him: the long, limp tendrils drooping over his collar, dull brown mixed with strands of gray, and the worn lines fanning out from his eyes.

“He looks like some eccentric, middle-aged … uncle,” Agatha said.

“He does not!” Daphne protested, so loudly that Stuart, slumped against Agatha’s knees, jolted upright and said, “Huh?” and Thomas raised the volume on the remote control.

“And Grandpa has food stains down his front,” Agatha said, “and you’ve got dirty fingernails.”

“Well, I do work in a florist shop,” Daphne told her. She darted a glance at her left hand, which rested on the arm of the couch.

“Is it Grandma?” Agatha asked. “But it can’t be, can it? I know we all miss her, but Ian’s been in charge of the house for ages, hasn’t he?”

“It’s true we miss her,” Daphne said, and just then she heard Bee calling her for supper on a long-ago summer evening. “ Daaph -ne!”—the two notes floating across the twilight. Surreptitiously, she started cleaning her nails. “But we get along,” she said. “We’re fine! And no way is Ian middle-aged. He’s forty; that’s not so old! He’s even got this sort of girlfriend. Clara. Have you met Clara? No, I guess not. Woman at our church. She’s okay.”

“Is she coming for Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Who, Clara?” Daphne asked stupidly. As a matter of fact, she had never given the woman much thought. “Well, no, I don’t believe he invited her,” she said.

“How about you?”

“How about me?”

“Are you seeing anyone special?”

“Oh. No,” Daphne said, “I’m between boyfriends at the moment.”

“What happened to … was it Ron?”

“Rich,” Daphne said. “He was getting too serious. I think I’m more the one-night-stand type, if you want the honest truth.”

She didn’t know why she had this urge to shock, sometimes, when she was talking to Agatha. It wasn’t even that effective, for Agatha merely raised her eyebrows and made no comment.

The TV said, “Drop us a postcard stating — female deposits her eggs in — not thirty -nine ninety-five, not twenty -nine ninety-five, but—”

“Stuart does that too,” Agatha told Thomas. “Just hand him a remote control and he turns sort of frantic. It must be hormonal.”

“Say what?” Stuart asked, snapping his head up.

“Tomorrow afternoon we clean house,” Agatha told Daphne.

“All right,” Daphne said meekly.

“We’ll have a regular, normal, home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner; I bought an eighteen-pound turkey at the grocery store, and I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan and the foreigners. Then afterward we’ll start cleaning and sorting. Discarding. Do you know Grandma’s cosmetics are still on her bureau?”

“Maybe Grandpa likes them there,” Daphne suggested.

“Her arthritis pills are still in the medicine cabinet.”

“Maybe—”

“Past their expiration date!” Agatha said, as if that settled it.

Stuart said, “Aggie, can’t we go to bed now?”

“Now?” Agatha said. She checked her watch. “It’s not even nine-thirty.”

Daphne was so sleepy that the room was misting over, and Thomas had been yawning, but they all settled back obediently and fixed their eyes on the screen.

Thursday afternoon Agatha and Daphne washed all the dishes, even those in the cupboards, and Thomas vacuumed downstairs while Ian tried to reduce the general disorder. Stuart, who turned out to be fairly useless around the house, watched a football game with Doug.

Thursday night at ten they had turkey sandwiches (in California it was seven) and then Agatha dusted the downstairs furniture, Daphne scrubbed the woodwork, and Thomas polished the silver.

Friday Daphne went back to Floral Fantasy, and by the time she got home the upstairs had been vacuumed and dusted as well and the washing machine repaired and all the laundry done. Bee’s little walnut desk in the living room stood bare, its cubbyholes dark as missing teeth; and when Daphne opened the drawers below she found only the essentials: a box of envelopes, a photo album whose six filled pages covered the past twenty-two years, and the document transforming those two strangers, Thomas and Agatha “Dulsimore,” into Bedloes and tucking them into Ian’s safekeeping along with Daphne herself. This last was so familiar she could have quoted it verbatim, but she scanned it yet again and so did Agatha, breathing audibly over Daphne’s left shoulder. “What’s disturbing,” Agatha told her (not for the first time), “is we don’t know a thing about our genetic heritage. What if we’re prone to diabetes? Or epilepsy?”

Diplomatically, Daphne refrained from pointing out that she herself did know her heritage, at least on her father’s side. She shook her head and put the document back in the drawer.

Saturday Ian went to Good Works, but Daphne stayed home to continue with the cleaning. “Grandpa,” Agatha said, “today we’re sorting through Grandma’s belongings. Anything you want to keep, you’d better let us know now.”

“Oh,” he said, and then he said, “Well, her lipstick, maybe. Her perfume bottles.”

“Lipstick? Perfume?”

“I like her bureau to have things on top of it. I don’t want to see it all blank.”

“Couldn’t we just put a vase on top?”

“No, we couldn’t,” her grandfather said firmly.

“Well, all right.”

“And I’d like her robe left hanging in her closet.”

“All right, Grandpa.”

“But you might ship her jewelry to Claudia. Or at least what jewelry is real.”

“Well, you’re going to have to tell us which is which,” Agatha said, for of course they wouldn’t know real from Woolworth’s.

But later, when they had packed all Bee’s limp, sad, powdery-smelling lingerie into the cartons Thomas brought up from the basement, they called for Doug to advise them on the jewelry and he didn’t answer. They’d assumed he was watching TV, but when they checked they found only Stuart, channel-hopping rapidly from golf to cartoons to cooking shows. Daphne said, “I bet he’s at the foreigners’.”

“Honestly,” Agatha said.

“The foreigners have a VCR now, did you know? They own every Rita Hayworth movie ever made.”

“Run get him, will you?” Agatha asked Thomas.

But Thomas said, “Maybe we should just let him stay there.”

“Well, what’ll we do about the jewelry?”

“Send Claudia the whole box, for heaven’s sake,” Daphne said. She told Thomas, “Wrap the whole box for mailing. You’ll find paper and string in the pantry.”

“But it isn’t just the jewelry,” Agatha said. “We need him here to answer other questions, too.”