Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

That evening, walking to choir practice, she counted up the days once more and realized that Mr. Moran might not have received her letter on Tuesday after all. She hadn't mailed it till nearly noon, she remembered.

This, made her feel better. She started walking faster, waving at Serena when she spotted her on the steps of the church.

Mr. Nichols was late, and the choir members joked and gossiped while they waited for him. They were all a little heady now that spring was here-even old Mrs. Britt. The church windows were open and they could hear the neighborhood children playing out on the sidewalk. The night air smelled of newly cut grass. Mr. Nichols, when he arrived, wore a sprig of lavender in his buttonhole. He must have bought it from the street vendor, who had only that morning appeared with his cart for the first time that year. "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Nichols said. He set his briefcase on a pew and rooted through it for his notes.

The church door opened again and in walked Ira Mo-ran.

He was very tall and somber, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and slim black trousers. He wore a stern expression that lengthened his chin, as if there were something lumpy in his mouth. Maggie felt her heart stop. She felt icy at first and then overheated, but she stared through him blankly with dry, wide eyes, keeping her thumb in place in the hymnbook. Even in that first moment, she knew he wasn't a ghost or a mirage. He was as real as the gummy varnished pews, not so flawlessly assembled as she had pictured but more intricately tex-tured-more physical, somehow; more complicated.

Mr. Nichols said, "Oh, Ira. Glad to see you."

"Thanks," Ira said. Then he filed through the folding chairs toward the rear, where the men sat, and he took a seat. But Maggie saw how his gaze first skimmed the women in front, resting finally on her. She could tell he knew about the letter. She felt a flush pass over her face. Ordinarily graceful out of pure caution, pure timidity, she had been caught in an error so clumsy that she didn't believe she could ever again meet another person's eyes.

She sang numbly, standing and sitting as ordered. She sang "Once to Every Man and Nation" and "Shall We Gather at the River." Then Mr. Nichols had the men do "Shall We Gather at the River" on their own, and then he asked the accompanist to repeat a certain passage. While this was going on, Maggie leaned toward Mrs. Britt and whispered, "Wasn't that the Moran boy? The one who came in late?"

"Why, yes, I believe it was," Mrs. Britt said pleasantly.

"Didn't you tell us he'd been killed?"

"I did?" Mrs. Britt asked. She looked surprised and sat back in her chair. A moment later, she sat forward again and said, "That was the Rand boy who was killed. Monty Rand."

"Oh," Maggie said.

Monty Rand had been a little pale dishcloth of a person with an incongruously deep bass voice. Maggie had never much liked him.

After choir practice she gathered her belongings as quickly as possible and was first out the door, scuttling down the sidewalk with her purse hugged to her chest, but she hadn't even reached the corner when she heard Ira behind her. "Maggie?" he called.

She slowed beneath a streetlight and then stopped, not looking around. He came up next to her. His legs made a shadow like scissors on the sidewalk.

"Mind if I walk your way?" he said.

"Do what you like," she told him shortly. He fell into step beside her.

"So how've you been?" he asked.

"I'm okay."

"You're out of school now, right?"

She nodded. They crossed a street.

"Got a job?" he asked.

"I work at the Silver Threads Nursing Home."

"Oh. Well, good."

He started whistling the last hymn they had practiced: "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." He sauntered beside her with his hands in his pockets.

They passed a couple kissing at a bus stop. Maggie cleared her throat and said, "Silly me! I mixed you up with the Rand boy."

"Rand?"

"Monty Rand; he got killed in boot camp and I thought they said it was you."

She still didn't look at him, although he was near enough so she could smell his fresh-ironed shirt. She wondered who had ironed it. One of his sisters, probably. What did that have to do with anything? She tightened her hold on her purse and walked faster, but Ira kept up with her. She was conscious of his dark, hooked presence at her elbow.

"So now will you write to Monty's father?" he asked her.

When she risked a sidelong glance she saw the humorous pleat at the corner of his mouth.

"Go ahead and laugh," she told him.

"I'm not laughing."

"Go ahead! Tell me I made a fool of myself."

"Do you hear me laughing?"

They had reached her block now. She could see her house up ahead, part of a string of row houses, the porch glowing orange beneath the bugproof light. This time when she stopped she looked directly into his face, and he returned the look without a hint of a smile, keeping his hands shoved in his pockets. She hadn't expected his eyes to be so narrow. He could have been Asian, rather than Indian.

"Your father must have split his sides," she said.

"No, he was just ... he just asked me what it could mean."

She tried to think what words she had used in the letter. Special, she'd written. Oh, Lord. And worse yet: wonderful. She wished she could disappear.

"I remember you from choir practice," Ira said. "You're Josh's sister, right? But I guess we never really knew each other."

"No, of course not," she said. "Goodness! We were total strangers." She tried to sound brusque and sensible.

He studied her a moment. Then he said, "So do you think we might get to know each other now?"

"Well," she said, "I do go out with someone."

"Really? Who?"

"Boris Drumm," she said.

"Oh, yes."

She looked off toward her house. She said, "We'll probably get married."

"I see," he said.

"Well, goodbye," she told him.

He lifted a hand in silence, thought a moment, and then turned and walked away.

That Sunday, though, he came to sing with the choir at the morning service. Maggie felt relieved, almost lightweight with relief, as if she'd been given a second chance, and then her heart sank when he just melted into the crowd again after church. But Thursday night he was at choir practice again and he walked her home when it was over. They talked about trivial subjects-Mrs. Britt's splintery voice, for instance. Maggie grew more comfortable. When they reached her house she saw her neighbor's dog out front, peeing on Maggie's mother's one rosebush, with the neighbor standing there watching; so she called, "Hey, lady! Get your dog out of our yard, you hear?" She was joking; it was the rough style of humor she had picked up from her brothers. But Ira didn't know that and he looked taken aback. Then Mrs. Wright laughed and said, '^You and who else going to make me, kid?" and Ira relaxed. But Maggie felt she'd been clumsy once again, and she murmured a hasty good night and went inside.

Soon enough it became a pattern-Thursday nights and Sunday mornings.

People started to notice. Maggie's mother said, "Maggie? Does Boris know about this new friendship of yours?" and Maggie snapped, "Of course he knows"-a lie, or at best a half-truth. (Maggie's mother thought Boris was God's gift to women.) But Se-rena said, "Good for you! High time you dumped Mr. Holier-than-Thou."

"I haven't dumped him!"

"Why not?" Serena asked. "When you compare him to Ira! Ira's so mysterious."

"Well, he is part Indian, of course," Maggie said.

"And you have to admit he's attractive."

Oh, Jesse was not the only one who'd been swayed by a single friend!

Certainly Serena had more than a little to do with all that happened afterward.

She asked Maggie and Ira to sing a duet at her wedding, for instance. Out of the blue (for Ira had never been thought to have a particularly striking voice), she took it into her head that they should sing "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" before the exchange of vows. So of course they had to practice; so of course he had to come to her house. They commiserated with each other and they clucked over Serena's musical taste, but it never occurred to them to refuse her. Maggie's mother kept tip-tapping in and out with folded laundry that had no business in the living room. " 'Once,' " they sang, " 'on a high and windy hill,' " and then Maggie sputtered into laughter, but Ira remained sober. Maggie seemed to be turning into someone else, those days-someone giddy and unstable and accident-prone. Sometimes she imag\ ined that that sympathy note had thrown her permanently off balance.