Anne Tyler - The Accidental Tourist

She gave him his card to sign and accepted his key. After she had unlocked his box she stood back, scrutinizing her nails, while he rummaged through various papers for his passport. Then he turned to tell her he was finished, but all at once he was so moved by her tact in looking elsewhere, by the delicacy that people could come up with on their own (for surely it wouldn’t have been written into the bank’s instructions)… Well, he must be going soft in the head. It was the weather or something; it was the season or something; he had not been sleeping well. He said, “Thank you very much,” and took back his key and left.

At his grandfather’s house, Rose was out front pruning the hedge. Her gardening smock was an enormous gray workshirt inherited from Charles. When she saw their car pull up she straightened and waved. Then she went on pruning while they consulted her about fertilizers. “For azaleas and what else do you have, andromeda, acid-loving plants…” she mused.

Sarah said, “Where are the children today?”

“Children?”

“Your nephew and nieces.”

“Oh, they went home to their mother.”

Sarah said, “I just assumed, since you hadn’t moved back with Julian…”

“Well, not yet, of course,” Rose said.

Macon, anxious to guard her privacy, murmured, “No, of course not,” practically at the same moment, but Sarah said, “Why? What’s keeping you?”

“Oh, Sarah, you wouldn’t believe what a state I found the boys in when I came back here,” Rose said. “They were living in their pajamas so as not to have too much laundry. They were eating gorp for their suppers.”

“I’m not even going to ask what gorp is,” Sarah said.

“It’s a mixture of wheat germ and nuts and dried—”

“But what about your apartment, Rose? What about Julian?”

“Oh, you know, I kept losing that apartment every time I turned around,” Rose said vaguely. “I’d head one block east to the grocery store and then turn west to get back again and I’d always be wrong; always. The apartment building would have worked over to the east somehow; I don’t know how.”

There was a silence. Finally Macon said, “Well, if you could get us some of that fertilizer, Rose…”

“Certainly,” she said. And she went off to the toolshed.

They had lunch at the Old Bay Restaurant — Sarah’s idea. Macon said, “Are you sure?” and Sarah said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“But you always tell me it’s boring,” Macon said.

“There are worse things than boring, I’ve decided.”

He didn’t think that was much of a recommendation, but he went along with it.

The restaurant was full, even though it was barely noon, and they had to wait a few minutes to be seated. Macon stood by the hostess’s podium trying to adjust to the dimness. He surveyed the other diners and found something odd about them. They were not the usual Old Bay crowd — middle aged, one face much like the next — but an assortment of particular and unusual individuals. He saw a priest offering a toast to a woman in a tennis dress, and a smartly suited woman with a young man in an orange gauze robe, and two cheerful schoolgirls loading all their potato chips onto the plate of a small boy. From where he stood Macon couldn’t hear what any of these people were saying; he had to guess. “Maybe the woman wants to join a convent,” he told Sarah, “and the priest is trying to discourage her.”

“Pardon?”

“He’s pointing out that sorting her husband’s socks can be equally whatever-he’d-call-it, equally holy. And the young man in gauze, well…”

“The young man in gauze is Ashley Demming,” Sarah said. “You know Ashley. Peter and Lindy Demming’s son. My, he’s aged poor Lindy twenty years in the last six months, hasn’t he? I don’t think they’re ever going to get over this.”

“Ah, well,” Macon said.

Then they were shown to a table.

Sarah ordered something called a White Lady and Macon ordered a sherry. With their meal they had a bottle of wine. Macon wasn’t used to drinking in the daytime; he grew a little fuzzy. So did Sarah, evidently, for she drifted off in the middle of a sentence about upholstery fabrics. She touched his hand, which was lying on the tablecloth. “We ought to do this more often,” she said.

“Yes, we ought to.”

“You know what I missed most when we were separated? The little, habitual things. The Saturday errands. Going to Eddie’s for coffee beans. Even things that used to seem tiresome, like the way you’d take forever in the hardware store.”

When he folded her hand into a fist it was round, like a bird. It had no sharp angles.

“I’m not sure if you know this,” she said, “but for a while I was seeing another man.”

“Well, fine; whatever; eat your salad,” he told her.

“No, I want to say it, Macon. He was just getting over the death of his wife, and I was getting over things too so of course… Well, we started out very slowly, we started as friends, but then he began talking about getting married someday. After we’d given ourselves some time, he meant. In fact I think he really loved me. He took it hard when I told him you’d moved back.”

She looked straight at Macon when she said that, her eyes a sudden blue flash. He nodded.

“But there were these things I had trouble with,” she said. “I mean good things; qualities I’d always wished for. He was a very dashing driver, for instance. Not unsafe; just dashing. At first, I liked that. Then bit by bit it began to feel wrong. ‘Double-check your rearview mirror!’ I wanted to tell him. ‘Fasten your seatbelt! Inch past stop signs the way my husband does!’ He never examined a restaurant bill before he paid it — shoot, he didn’t even take his credit card receipt when he walked away from a table — and I thought of all the times I sat stewing while you totted up every little item. I thought, ‘Why do I miss that? It’s perverse!’ ”

Like “eck cetera,” Macon thought.

Like Muriel saying, “eck cetera.” And Macon wincing.

And the emptiness now, the thinness when he heard it pronounced correctly.

He stroked the dimpled peaks that were Sarah’s knuckles.

“Macon, I think that after a certain age people just don’t have a choice,” Sarah said. “You’re who I’m with. It’s too late for me to change. I’ve used up too much of my life now.”

You mean to tell me you can just use a person up and then move on? Muriel had asked.

Evidently so, was the answer. For even if he had stayed with Muriel, then wouldn’t Sarah have been left behind?

“After a certain age,” he told Sarah, “it seems to me you can only choose what to lose.”

“What?” she said.

“I mean there’s going to be something you have to give up, whichever way you cut it.”

“Well, of course,” she said.

He supposed she’d always known that.

They finished their meal but they didn’t order coffee because they were running late. Sarah had her class; she was studying with a sculptor on Saturdays. Macon called for the bill and paid it, self-consciously totaling it first. Then they stepped out into the sunshine. “What a pretty day,” Sarah said. “It makes me want to play hooky.”

“Why don’t you?” Macon asked. If she didn’t go to class, he wouldn’t have to work on his guidebook.

But she said, “I can’t disappoint Mr. Armistead.”

They drove home, and she changed into a sweat suit and set off again. Macon carried in the fertilizer, which Rose had poured into a bucket. It was something shredded that had no smell — or only a harsh, chemical smell, nothing like the truckloads of manure the men used to bring for his grandmother’s camellias. He set it on the pantry floor and then he took the dog out. Then he made himself a cup of coffee to clear his head. He drank it at the kitchen sink, staring into the yard. The cat rubbed against his ankles and purred. The clock over the stove ticked steadily. There was no other sound.