Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

Scott flushed and said nothing. Laurel Canfield said, “It’s nice to see you . Are you doing your spring shopping?”

“Oh, well, ah—”

He looked toward the stall. Now Alexander’s trousers were slumped around his ankles. “I’m helping the son of a friend,” he explained.

“We’ve just been buying out the sock department.”

“Yes, I see you have.”

“Seems every other week I find Scott’s run through his socks again; you know how they are at this age—”

She stopped herself. She looked horrified. She said, “Or, rather…”

“Yes, certainly!” Macon said. “Amazing, isn’t it?” He felt so embarrassed for her that he was pleased, at first, to see another familiar face behind her. Then he realized whose it was. There stood his mother-in-law. “Why!” he said. Was she still Mother Sidey? Mrs. Sidey? Who, for God’s sake?

Luckily, it turned out that Laurel Canfield knew her too. “Paula Sidey,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since last year’s Hunt Cup.”

“Yes, I’ve been away,” Mrs. Sidey told her, and then she dropped her lids somewhat, as if drawing a curtain, before saying, “Macon.”

“How are you?” Macon said.

She was flawlessly groomed, industriously tended — a blue-haired woman in tailored slacks and a turtleneck. He used to worry that Sarah would age the same way, develop the same brittle carapace, but now he found himself admiring Mrs. Sidey’s resolve. “You’re looking well,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she said, touching her hairdo. “I suppose you’re here for your spring wardrobe.”

“Oh, Macon’s helping a friend!” Laurel Canfield caroled. She was so chirpy, all of a sudden, that Macon suspected she’d just now recalled Mrs. Sidey’s relationship to him. She looked toward Alexander’s stall. Alexander was in his socks now. One sock rose and vanished, stepping into a flood of blue denim. “Isn’t shopping for boys so difficult?” she said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mrs. Sidey said. “I never had one. I’m here for the denim skirts.”

“Oh, the skirts, well, I notice they’re offering a—”

“What friend are you helping to buy for?” Mrs. Sidey asked Macon.

Macon didn’t know what to tell her. He looked toward the stall. If only Alexander would just stay hidden forever, he thought. How to explain this scrawny little waif, this poor excuse of a child who could never hold a candle to the real child?

Contrary as always, Alexander chose that moment to step forth.

He wore an oversized T-shirt that slipped a bit off one shoulder, as if he’d just emerged from some rough-and-tumble game. His jeans were comfortably baggy. His face, Macon saw, had somehow filled out in the past few weeks without anybody’s noticing; and his hair — which Macon had started cutting at home — had lost that shaved prickliness and grown thick and floppy.

“I look wonderful !” Alexander said.

Macon turned to the women and said, “Actually, I find shopping for boys is a pleasure.”

There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you’re safe asleep in someone else’s house. Macon heard the soft pattering; he heard Muriel get up to close a window. She crossed his vision like the gleam of headlights crossing a ceiling, white and slim and watery in a large plain slip from Goodwill Industries. She shut the window and the stillness dropped over him and he went back to sleep.

But in the morning his first thought was, Oh, no! Rain! On Rose’s wedding day!

He got up, careful not to wake Muriel, and looked out. The sky was bright but flat, the color of oyster shells — not a good sign. The scrawny little dogwood in back was dripping from every twig and bud. Next door, Mr. Butler’s ancient heap of scrap lumber had grown several shades darker.

Macon went downstairs, tiptoeing through the living room where Claire lay snoring in a tangle of blankets. He fixed a pot of coffee and then called Rose on the kitchen phone. She answered instantly, wide awake. “Are you moving the wedding indoors?” he asked her.

“We’ve got too many guests to move it indoors.

“Why? How many are coming?”

“Everyone we’ve ever known.”

“Good grief, Rose.”

“Never mind, it will clear.”

“But the grass is all wet!”

“Wear galoshes,” she told him. She hung up.

Since she’d met Julian she’d grown so airy, Macon thought. So flippant. Lacking in depth.

She was right about the weather, though. By afternoon there was a weak, pale sun. Muriel decided to wear the short-sleeved dress she’d planned on, but maybe with a shawl tossed over her shoulders. She wanted Alexander to put on a suit — he did have one, complete with waistcoat. He protested, though, and so did Macon. “Jeans and a good white shirt. That’s plenty,” Macon told her.

“Well, if you’re sure.”

Lately, she’d been deferring to him about Alexander. She had finally given in on the question of sneakers and she’d stopped policing his diet. Contrary to her predictions, Alexander’s arches did not fall flat and he was not overtaken by raging eczema. At worst, he suffered a mild skin rash now and then.

The wedding was set for three o’clock. Around two thirty they started out, proceeding self-consciously toward Macon’s car. It was a Saturday and no one else in the neighborhood was so dressed up. Mr. Butler was standing on a ladder with a hammer and a sack of nails. Rafe Daggett was taking his van apart. The Indian woman was hosing down a glowing threadbare carpet that she’d spread across the sidewalk, and then she turned off the water and lifted the hem of her sari and stamped around so the carpet radiated little bursts of droplets. Every passing car, it seemed, labored under a top-heavy burden of mattresses and patio furniture, reminding Macon of those ants who scuttle back to their nests with loads four times their own size.

“I think I’m supposed to be the best man,” Macon told Muriel after he’d started driving.

“You didn’t mention that!”

“And Charles is giving her away.”

“It’s a real wedding, then,” Muriel said. “Not just two people standing up together.”

“That’s what Rose said she wanted.”

“I wouldn’t do it like that at all,” Muriel said. She glanced toward the rear and said, “Alexander, quit kicking my seat. You’re about to drive me crazy. No,” she said, facing forward, “if I was to marry, know what I’d do? Never tell a soul. Act like I’d been married for years. Slip off somewheres to a justice of the peace and come back like nothing had happened and make out like I’d been married all along.”

“This is Rose’s first time, though,” Macon told her.

“Yes, but even so, people can say, ‘It sure took you long enough.’ I can hear my mother now; that’s what she’d say for certain. ‘Sure took you long enough. I thought you’d never get around to it,’ is what she’d say. If I was ever to marry.”

Macon braked for a traffic light.

“If I was ever to decide to marry,” Muriel said.

He glanced over at her and was struck by how pretty she looked, with the color high in her cheeks and the splashy shawl flung around her shoulders. Her spike-heeled shoes had narrow, shiny ankle straps. He never could figure out why ankle straps were so seductive.

The first person they saw when they arrived was Macon’s mother. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to Macon that Alicia would be invited to her daughter’s wedding, and when she opened the front door it took him a second to place her. She was looking so different, for one thing. She had dyed her hair a dark tomato red. She wore a long white caftan trimmed with vibrant bands of satin, and when she reached up to hug him a whole culvert of metal bangles clattered and slid down her left arm. “Macon, dear!” she said. She smelled of bruised gardenias. “And who may this be?” she asked, peering past him.