Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Who, Clara?”

“Ian.”

“Maybe they’ve had a fight or something,” Daphne said.

“More likely they’ve just withered on the vine,” Agatha told her.

Up ahead, Stuart was asking all about the Church of the Second Chance. He wanted to know how sizable a membership it had, when it had been founded, what its tax status was. You could tell he was only making conversation, but Ian answered each question gladly and at length. He said that Second Chance had saved his life. Doug, walking in front with Thomas, coughed and said, “Oh, well, ah …” but Ian insisted, “It did, Dad. You know it did.”

He told Stuart, “Sometimes I have this insomnia. I fall asleep just fine but then an hour or so later I wake up, and that’s when the troublesome thoughts move in. You know? Things I did wrong, things I said wrong, mistakes I want to take back. And I always wonder, ‘If I didn’t have Someone to turn this all over to, how would I get through this? How do other people get through it?’ Because I’m surely not the only one, am I?”

They had reached an intersection now, and they waited on the curb while a spurt of traffic passed. Agatha clutched her coat collar tight and glanced over at Daphne. There was something meaningful in the way she narrowed her eyes. And you didn’t want me to invite a girlfriend for him , she must be saying.

“You know that clock downstairs that strikes the number of hours,” Ian told Stuart. “And then it strikes once at every half hour. So when you hear it striking once, you can’t be certain how much of the night you’ve used up. Is it twelve-thirty, or is it one, or is it one-thirty? You have to just lie there and wait, and hope with all your heart that next time it will strike two. Or what’s worse, some nights it starts striking one, two, three and you say, ‘Ah!’ And then four, five and you say, ‘Can this be? Have I really slept through till dawn?’ And then six, seven and you say, ‘Oh-oh,’ because you can see it’s not that light out. And sure enough, the clock goes on to twelve, and you brace yourself for another six hours till morning.”

The street was clear now and they could have crossed, but instead they stood watching him. It was Agatha who finally spoke. “Oh, Ian,” she said. “Oh, damnit. How much longer are you going to be on your own?”

“Why, not long at all,” he told her.

They squinted at him in the sunlight.

“I wasn’t planning to bring this up yet,” he said. “But anyhow. Since you ask. I believe I might be getting married.”

Somewhere far off, a car honked.

Agatha said, “Married?”

“At least, we’re talking it over.”

Stuart said, “Hey, now!” He punched Ian in the shoulder. “Hey, guy. Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” Ian said. He was grinning.

“This is you and Clara,” Agatha said.

“Who? No, it’s Rita,” he said. He told Daphne, “You know Rita.”

Daphne’s mouth dropped open.

“Rita who?” Agatha asked. She tugged Daphne’s jacket sleeve. “Who’s Rita?”

Their grandfather was the one who answered. “Rita the Clutter Counselor,” he said. “Hot dog!”

“But who is she?” Agatha demanded. They started crossing the street, with Ian leading the way. “Have you met her, Thomas?”

Thomas said, “Nope.” But he was grinning too.

“We’ve only been going out a month or so,” Ian told them. “When I first got to know her I held back, for a while. I was afraid we were too different. But then finally I said, ‘I just have to do this,’ and I called her up. By the end of that first evening it seemed we’d known each other forever.”

“You must have at least suspected,” Agatha told Daphne.

“I swear I didn’t,” Daphne said.

She was in that stunned state of mind where every sound seems unusually distinct. Of course she liked Rita very much, and yet … “This is so sudden,” she said to Ian. “Shouldn’t you go more inch-by-inch?”

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned. “Look,” he said. “I’m forty-one years old. I’m not getting any younger. And you all know my beliefs. You know I can’t just … live with her or anything. I want to get married.”

“Right on!” Stuart cheered.

“Besides which, you’re going to love her. Aren’t they, Dad?”

“Absolutely,” his father said, beaming. “She let me keep my workbench just the way I wanted. She let me keep Bee’s lipstick on the bureau.”

“She’s very tall and slim and beautiful,” Ian told Agatha. “She could easily be Indian. She has beautiful long black hair and she moves in this loose, swinging way, like a dancer.”

Daphne looked at him.

As a matter of fact, every word he had said was true.

“There’s something honest about her, and just … right,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”

Agatha stepped forward, then. She put both hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Congratulations, Ian,” she said.

“Me, too,” Daphne said, and she kissed his other cheek, and Thomas clamped his neck in a rough hug. “Mr. Mysterious,” he said.

Their grandfather touched Ian’s arm shyly. Ian was trying to get the grin off his face.

They started walking again. Agatha asked all about the wedding, and Doug described how Rita admired his baby-food-jar system for sorting screws. But Daphne strolled next to Stuart in silence.

She was thinking about the dream she had dreamed at Thanksgiving. It wasn’t so much a dream as a feeling — a wash of intense, deep, perfect love. She had awakened and thought, For whom? and realized it was Ian. But it was Ian back in her childhood, when he had seemed the most magnificent person on earth. She hadn’t noticed till then how pale and flawed her love had grown since. It had made her want to weep for him, and that was why, at breakfast that day, she had said she hadn’t dreamed any dreams at all.

She asked if he thought he might ever want children and he said, “Oh, well, maybe sometime.” She asked how long he figured they should wait and he said, “A few years, maybe? I don’t know.”

They’d been married just four months, by then. He could see his answer came as a disappointment.

But why should they rush to change things? Their lives were perfect. Simply watching her — simply sitting at the kitchen table watching her knead a loaf of bread-filled him with contentment. Her hands were so capable, and she moved with such economy. When she wiped her floury palms on the seat of her jeans, he was struck with admiration for her naturalness.

“I had been wondering about sooner,” she told him.

“Well, no need to decide this instant,” he said.

He watched her oil a baking pan, working her long, tanned fingers deftly into the corners, and he thought of a teacher he had had in seventh grade. Mrs. Arnett, her name was. Mrs. Arnett had once been his ideal woman — soft curves and sweet perfume and ivory skin. He had found any number of reasons to bicycle past her house. Her front bow window, which was curtained off day and night by cream-colored draperies, had displayed a single, pale blue urn, and somehow that urn had come to represent all his fantasies about marriage. He had imagined Mrs. Arnett greeting her husband at the door each evening, wearing not the bermudas or dull slacks his mother wore but a swirly dress the same shade of blue as the urn; and she would kiss Mr. Arnett full on the lips and lead him inside. Everything would be so focused. No distractions: no TV blaring or telephone ringing or neighbors stopping by.

Certainly no children.

You couldn’t say Ian and Rita lived that way, even now. They were still in the house on Waverly Street — partly a matter of economics, partly to keep his father company. (Daphne had a place of her own now.) His father still occupied the master bedroom, and Rita’s widowed mother was forever dropping by, and Rita’s various aunts and cousins and a whole battalion of woman friends sat permanently around the kitchen table waiting for her to pour coffee. Where would children fit into all this?