Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

"Now, how do you know that?"

"It's nineteen seventy-three, isn't it? And three is our number! Look: both Duncan and I were born in nineteen thirty-three. We were married in nineteen fifty-three and Meg was born on the third day of the third month in nineteen fifty-five. Isn't that something?"

"Oh, Mama," Meg said, and ducked her head over her coffee.

"Meg's afraid that people will think I'm eccentric," said Justine. "But after all, it's not as if I believed in numerology or anything. Just lucky numbers. What's your lucky number, Red Emma?"

"Eight," said Red Emma.

"Ah. See there? Eight is forceful and good at organizing. You would succeed at any business or career, just anything."

"I would?"

Red Emma looked down at her billowing white nylon front, the flowered handkerchief prinked to her bosom with a cameo brooch.

"Now, Meg doesn't have a lucky number. I'm worried that nothing will ever happen to her."

"Mama."

"Meg was due to be born in May and I wondered how that could happen.

Unless she arrived on the third, of course. But see? She was premature, she came in March after all."

"I always ask for eight at the Basket of Cheer lottery," said Red Emma.

"And I've won it twice, too. Forty dollars' worth of fine-quality liquor."

"Of course. Now, who's the fortune teller in this town?"

"Fortune teller?"

The grandfather rattled and crackled his paper.

"Don't tell me you don't have one," said Justine.

"Not to my knowledge we don't."

"Well, you know where I'll be living. Come when I'm settled and I'll tell your fortune free."

"You tell fortunes."

"I do church fairs, bazaars, club meetings, teas-anybody's, any time.

People can knock on my door in the dead of night if they have some urgent problem and I will get up in my bathrobe to give them a reading. I don't mind at all. I like it, in fact. I have insomnia."

"But-you mean you tell fortunes seriously?" Red Emma asked.

"How else would I tell them?"

Red Emma looked at Duncan. He looked back, unsmiling.

"Well, if we could have the keys, then," said Justine.

Red Emma fetched them, sleepwalking-two flat, tinny keys on a shower curtain ring. "I really do need to have my fortune told," she said. "I wouldn't want this spread around but I'm considering a change in employment."

"Oh, I could help out with that."

"Don't laugh, will you? I'd like to be a mailman. I even passed the tests. Could you really tell me whether that would be a lucky move or not?"

"Of course," said Justine.

Red Emma rang up their bill, which Duncan paid with a BankAmericard so worn it would not emboss properly. Then they filed out, and she stood by the door to watch them go. When Justine passed, Red Emma touched her shoulder. "I'm just so anxious, you see," she said. "I don't sleep good at all. My mind swings back and forth between decisions. Oh, I know it's nothing big. I mean, a mailman, what is that to the world?

What's it going to matter a hundred years from now? I don't fool myself it's anything important. Only day after day in this place, the grease causing my hair to flop halfway through the morning and the men all making smart remarks and me just feeding them and feeding them . . . though the pay is good and I really don't know what Uncle Harry would say if I was to quit after all these years."

"Change," said Justine.

"Beg pardon?"

"Change. I don't need cards for that. Take the change. Always change."

"Well-is that my fortune?"

"Yes, it is," said Justine. "Goodbye, Red Emma! See you soon!"

And she was gone, leaving Red Emma to pleat her lower lip with her fingers and ponder beside the plate glass door.

Justine drove the Ford down Main Street with the cat racing back and forth across the rear window ledge, yowling like an old, angry baby while people on the sidewalks stopped and stared. Meg sat with her hands folded; by now she was used to the racket. The grandfather simply shut his hearing aid off and gazed from his bubble of silence at the little wooden Woolworth's, the Texaco, the Amoco, the Arco, a moldering A&P, a neat brick post office with a flag in front. This time Duncan's truck was ahead, and Justine followed him in a right-hand turn down a side street lined with one-story buildings. They passed a drugstore and an electric shop, and then they came to a row of small houses. Duncan parked in front of the first one. Justine pulled in behind him. "Here we are!" she said.

The house was white, worn down to gray. On the porch, square shingled columns rose waist-high and then stopped, giving the overhang a precarious, unreliable look. Although there was no second floor the dormer window of some attic or storage room bulged out of the roof like an eyelid. A snarl of wiry bushes guarded the crawlspace beneath the porch. "Oh, roses!" Justine cried. "Are those roses?" Her grandfather shifted in his seat.

"This house is even worse than the last," said Meg.

"Never mind, here you'll have a room of your own. You won't have to sleep in the living room. Isn't that going to be nice?"

"Yes, Mama," Meg said.

Duncan was already pacing the yard when the others reached him. "I'm going to put a row or two of corn here," he told them. "Out back is too shady but see how much sun we get in front? I'm going to plow up the grass and plant corn and cucumbers. I have this plan for fertilizer, I'm going to buy a blender and grind up all our garbage with a little water. Pay attention, Justine. I want you to save everything, eggshells and orange peels and even bones. The bones we'll pressure-cook first. Have we got a pressure-cooker? We'll make a sort of jelly and spread that around here too."

Meanwhile the cat had streaked under the crawlspace, where she would stay till the moving was over, and the grandfather was climbing the front steps all hunkered and disapproving, muttering to himself, making an inventory of every splinter and knothole and paint blister, every nail worked loose, windowscreen split, floorboard warped. Meg sat down on the very top step. "I'm cold," she said.

Justine said, "Your father's going to take up farming. Maybe we'll have tomatoes."

"Will we be here to harvest them?" Meg asked nobody.

Justine found the keys in one of her pockets and opened the door. They stepped into a hall smelling of mildew, littered with newspapers and broken cardboard boxes. The kitchen leading off it contained a refrigerator with a motor on top, a dirty gas stove, and a sink on stilts. There was a living room with a boarded-up fireplace. In the back were the bathroom and three bedrooms, all tiny and dark, but Justine swept through flinging up windowshades and stirring the thick, musty air.

"Look! Someone left a pair of pliers," she said. "And here's a chair we can use for the porch." She was a pack rat; all of them were. It was a family trait. You could tell that in a flash when they started carrying things in from the truck-the bales of ancient, curly-edged magazines, zipper bags bursting with unfashionable clothes, cardboard boxes marked Clippings, Used Wrapping Paper, Photos, Empty Bottles. Duncan and Justine staggered into the grandfather's room carrying a steel filing cabinet from his old office, stuffed with carbon copies of all his personal correspondence for the twenty-three years since his retirement. In one corner of their own room Duncan stacked crates of machine parts and nameless metal objects picked up on walks, which he might someday want to use for some invention. He had cartons of books, most of them second-hand, dealing with things like the development of the quantum theory and the philosophy of Lao-tzu and the tribal life of Ila-speaking Northern Rhodesians. But when all of this clutter had been brought in (and it took the four of them two hours) there was next to nothing left in the truck.