Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Next birthday, I’ll be thirty,” Rita told him.

“Thirty’s young,” Ian said.

Next birthday, Ian would be forty-two.

Forty-two seemed way too old to be thinking of babies.

At the wood shop, one of the workers had a daughter smaller than his own granddaughters. He was on his second wife, a manicurist named LaRue, and LaRue had told him it wasn’t fair to deprive her of a family just because he had already had the joy of one. He had reported every detail of their arguments on the subject; and next he’d discussed the pregnancy, which seemed so new and exciting to LaRue and so old to Butch, and finally the baby herself, who cried every evening and interrupted dinner and caused LaRue to smell continually of spit-up milk. Now the baby was two and sometimes came along with her mother to give Butch a ride home after work. She would toddle through the shavings, crowing, and hold out her little arms until he set aside his plane and picked her up. “Ain’t she a doll?” he asked the others. “Ain’t she a living doll?” But the sight of his grizzled cheek next to that flower-petal face was disturbing, somehow, and Ian always turned away, smiling falsely, and grew very busy with his tools.

Ian and Rita went to church on foot that next Sunday because the weather was so fine. Besides, Ian liked the ceremony of it: the two of them holding hands as they walked and calling out greetings to various neighbors working in their yards. Rita wore a dress (or at least, a long black T-shirt that hit her above the knees), because she’d grown up at Alameda Baptist and considered jeans unsuitable for church. Her braid was wound in a knot at the nape of her neck. Ian couldn’t help noticing the unusually attractive way her hair grew, hugging her temples closely and swooping down over her ears in ripples.

“Did I tell you Mary-Clay went in for her ultrasound?” she asked. “Her doctor said she’s having twins.”

“Twins! Good grief,” he said. A shadow fell over him.

“Two little girls, her doctor thinks. Mary-Clay is just tickled to bits. Girls are easier than boys, she says.”

“Rita,” Ian said, “neither is easy.”

She glanced at him. He hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic.

“At least,” he said, “not according to my limited experience.”

They turned onto York Road. Ahead they could see a cluster of worshipers standing in front of the church, enjoying their last few moments of sunshine before they stepped inside. Rita said, “Well, now that you mention it, your experience was limited. Those children weren’t your own. You weren’t even solely responsible for them!”

“Right,” Ian told her. “I had both my parents helping, and still it wasn’t easy. A lot of it was just plain boring. Just providing a warm body, just being there; anyone could have done it. And then other parts were terrifying. Kids get into so much! They start to matter so much. Some days I felt like a fireman or a lifeguard or something — all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.”

Rita gathered a breath, but by then they’d reached the others. Sister Myra said, “Why, hello, you two!” and kissed them both, even Ian. She had never kissed Ian before he was married. Marriage changed things a good deal, he had learned.

They were the church’s only newlyweds at the moment, and almost the only ones ever. Their wedding had taken place at Alameda Baptist, but most of Second Chance had attended and Reverend Emmett had helped officiate, even donning one of Alameda’s flowing black pastoral robes so when he raised his arms to pray he had resembled a skinny Stealth bomber. Now they were passed from hand to hand like babies in an old folks’ home, with Rita saying those just-right things that women somehow know to say. “Brother Kenneth, how’s that sciatica? Why, Sister Denise! You’ve gone and lightened your hair.” Ian was impressed, but also disconcerted. This never seemed to be his Rita, who spent her weekdays bluntly informing customers that most of their lifelong treasures belonged in the nearest landfill.

They went inside and took two seats halfway up the aisle. Sister Nell was passing out hymn pamphlets. When Ian opened his he found the top corner of each page torn off as if gnawed by a mouse, and he smiled to himself and looked around for Daphne. (She must have some kind of deficiency, Agatha always said, to eat paper the way she did.) But he didn’t see her. The fact was that she attended less and less, now that she lived downtown. Just about all you could count on her for was Good Works on Saturday mornings.

Rita was talking with her neighbor on the other side, Brother Kenneth’s son Johnny, who used to be a little pipsqueak of a boy but now was studying for the ministry. Sometimes lately he had assisted with the services. Today, though, Reverend Emmett rose alone to deliver the opening prayer. Rita faced forward obediently and bowed her head, but Ian sensed she wasn’t listening. She failed to straighten when Reverend Emmett said, “Amen,” and she chewed a thumbnail edgily during the Bible reading. Ian reached over and captured her hand and tucked it into his, and she relaxed against him.

“Thus concludes the reading of the Holy Word,” Reverend Emmett said. “We will now sing hymn fourteen.”

The little organ wheezed out the first notes and Ian let go of Rita’s hand. But she didn’t draw away. Instead she looked directly into his face as they stood up, ignoring the hymnal he held before them.

“Listen,” she said in a low voice. “I think I might be pregnant.”

He had already opened his mouth to start singing. He shut it. The congregation went on without them: “Break Thou the bread of life …”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” she said. And then she whispered, “But I intend to be glad about this, I tell you!”

What could he say?

“Me, too, sweetheart,” he said.

They faced front again. Stammering slightly, he found his place and joined the other singers.

That was in July. By September, she was having to leave the waistband of her jeans unsnapped and she wore her loosest work shirts over them. She said she thought she could feel the baby moving now — a little bubble, she said, flitting here and there in a larking sort of way. Ian set a palm on her abdomen but it was still too early for him to feel anything from outside.

She bought a book that showed what the baby looked like week by week, and she and Ian studied it together. A lima bean. A tadpole. Then finally a person but a clumsily constructed one, like something modeled in preschool. They were thinking of Joshua for a boy and Rachel for a girl. Ian tried the names on his tongue to see how they’d work in everyday life. “Oh, and I’d like you to meet my son, Joshua Bedloe …” His son! The notion brought forth the most bewildering mixture of feelings: worry and excitement and also, underneath, a pervasive sense of tiredness. He told Rita about everything but the tiredness. That he kept to himself.

Now it seemed the household was completely taken over by women. Rita’s batty mother, Bobbeen, spent hours in their kitchen, generally seated not at the table but on it and dangling her high-heeled sandals from her toes. With her crackling, bleached-out fan of hair and snapping gum and staticky barrage of advice, she seemed electric, almost dangerous. “You’re insane to go on working when you don’t have to, Rita, stark staring insane. Don’t you remember what happened to your aunt Dora when she kept on? You tell her, Ian. Tell her to quit hauling other folkses’ junk when she’s four and a half months gone and all her pelvic bones are coming off their hinges.” But she didn’t actually mean for Ian to say anything; she didn’t leave the briefest pause before starting a new train of thought. “I guess you heard about Molly Sidney. Six months along and she phones her doctor, says, ‘Feels like somebody’s hauling rope out of way down low in my back.’ ‘Oh,’ her doctor says, That’s normal.’ Says, ‘Pay it no mind,’ and the very next night guess what.”