Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“To the cook!” Thomas said, raising his water glass, and they all said, “To Rita!” Rita grinned and raised her own glass. Probably for decades of Christmas Eves to come the Bedloes would be loyally eating black-eyed peas and rice.

It was afterward, in front of the fire, that Thomas announced his engagement. “You two won’t be the newest newlyweds anymore,” he told Ian. This wasn’t exactly a shock — he’d been dating the same girl for some time now — but they had been hoping he would get over her. They all felt she bossed him around too much. (He kept falling for these managerial types who didn’t have any softness to them; they might as well be business partners, Daphne had once complained.) Still, the women hugged him and Doug said, “What do you know!” and Ian suggested they call Angie and welcome her to the family. So they did, lining up in the hall to tell her more or less the same thing in several different ways. While Ian was waiting his turn at the phone he had a sudden memory of Danny presenting Lucy in this very spot. What was it he had said? “I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life,” he had said, and then as now the family had received the news with the most resolute show of pleasure.

On Christmas morning they opened their presents — most of Ian’s and Rita’s relating to babies — and then cleared away the gift wrap and started getting ready for the dinner guests. Rita directed from an armchair Ian had dragged into the dining room, except that she kept jumping up to do things herself. Finally Agatha put Stuart in charge of diverting her. “Show her your card tricks, Stu,” she said. “Oh, please, no,” Rita groaned. Ian and his father fitted all the leaves into the table, and the women added last-minute touches to the dishes Rita had prepared. Everyone was entranced to find nothing but hors d’oeuvres. “Look! Artichokes,” Doug pointed out. “Look at this, kids, my favorite: Chesapeake crab spread. It’s just like the old days.” Rita beamed. Stuart told her, “Pick a card. Any card. Come on, Rita, pay attention.”

The current foreigners’ names were Manny, Mike, and Buck. They were the first to arrive — they always showed up on the dot, not familiar with Baltimore ways — and Mrs. Jordan followed, bearing one of her sumptuous black fruitcakes with the frosting you had to crack through with a chisel. Then Bobbeen appeared with an old-fashioned crank-style ice cream freezer, fully loaded and ready for the ice, and last came Curt, looking as if he’d just that minute rolled out of bed. Those who were guests had to have the hors d’oeuvres explained for them — all but Mrs. Jordan, of course, who’d been through this year after year. Mrs. Jordan said, “Why, you’ve even made Bee’s hearts-of-palm dish!” And later, once they’d taken their seats and Doug had offered the blessing, she said, “Rita, if Ian’s mother could see what you’ve done here she would be so pleased.”

“Remember the first time we tasted hearts of palm?” Agatha asked Thomas.

“Was that when we had the flu?”

“No, no, this was before. You were really little, and Daphne was just a baby. I don’t think she got to try them. But you and I were crazy about them; we polished off the platter. It wasn’t till five or six years later we had that flu.”

“Ugh! Worst flu of my life,” Thomas said.

“Mine too. I couldn’t eat a bite for days. But finally I called out, ‘Ian, I’m hungry!’ Remember, Ian? You were flat on your back—”

“ I was sick?” Ian asked.

“Everyone was, even Grandma and Grandpa. You said, ‘Hungry for what?’ And I thought and thought, and the only thing that came to me was hearts of palm.”

“So then we all wanted hearts of palm,” Thomas told him. “They just sounded so good , even though I’d forgotten them and Daphne’d never had them. We said, ‘Please, Ian, won’t you please bring us hearts of—’ ”

“I don’t remember this,” Ian said.

“So you got up and tottered downstairs, holding onto the banister—”

“Put your coat on over your pajamas, stepped into somebody’s boots—”

“Drove all the way to the grocery store and brought back hearts of palm.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” Ian said.

They regarded him fondly — all but the foreigners, who were giving the hors d’oeuvres their single-minded attention. “My hero!” Rita told him.

“I said, ‘Ian, thank you,’ ” Agatha went on, “and you said, ‘Thank you . Until you mentioned them,’ you said, ‘I didn’t realize that’s what I’d been wanting all along myself.’ ”

Stuart said, “Maybe they contained some trace element your bodies knew they needed.”

“Well, whatever,” Curt said, “these here taste mighty good. You should go into the catering business, Rita.”

“Oh, I believe I’ve got enough to do for the next little bit,” she told him. And she patted her abdomen, which Ian’s borrowed shirt could barely cover.

Daphne said, “Have you heard? After this baby’s born, Rita and I are planning to be partners. Half the time I’ll do clutter counseling while she stays home with the baby, half the time I’ll stay with the baby while she does clutter counseling.”

Ian raised his eyebrows. He knew Rita had been considering various strategies, but she hadn’t mentioned Daphne. He said, “What about Trips Unlimited?”

“That’s not really working out,” Daphne told him. “It’s too personal.”

“A travel agency is personal?”

“Mr. X and Mrs. Y book two flights to Paris and one hotel room, say, and I can’t let on I’ve noticed. Or they cheat on their expense accounts with first-class reservations to—”

No one suggested that this new job would surely be even more personal — that she seemed to search out the personal. Finally Curt said, “Well, if you ever get tired of clutter counseling you could always become a scribe.”

“Scribe?” Daphne asked, perking up.

“You could rent a stall at Harborplace and offer to write people’s letters for them.”

Daphne looked perplexed. The only person who laughed was Ian.

There was a little wait before dessert because they had to freeze the ice cream. Bobbeen said, “You realize we don’t have a single child here? No one begging to turn the crank for us.” But the foreigners, it emerged, would love to turn the crank. They rushed off to the kitchen while Daphne and Agatha cleared the table. Rita stayed seated at Ian’s left, debating baby names with Mrs. Jordan. Curt was attempting to break into the fruitcake, and Thomas was telling his grandfather about his latest computer game. The idea was, he said, to show how dislodging one historical event could dislodge a hundred others, even those that seemed unrelated. “Take slavery,” he said. “Students would tell the computer that the U.S. has never had slavery, and then they would name some later event. The computer goes, ‘Beep!’ and a message flashes up on the screen: Null and void. ”

“But why would that be any fun?” Doug asked.

“Well, it’s not supposed to be fun so much as educational.”

“I wonder whatever became of Monopoly,” Doug said wistfully.

Rita took Ian’s hand and placed it palm-down on a spot just beneath her left breast. “Feel,” she whispered. A round, blunt knob — a knee or foot or elbow — slid beneath his fingers. It always unnerved him when that happened.

Last week he had signed the papers for Rita’s hospital stay. She’d be in just overnight, if everything went as it should. On the first day he was liable for one dependent and on the second, for two. Two? Then he realized: the baby. One person checks in; two check out. It seemed like sleight of hand. He had never noticed before what a truly astonishing arrangement this was.