Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“Candles?” Delia asked.

“Try the broom cupboard.” Belle blew her nose with a honking sound that caused the cat to spring off her lap. “And this was not even my usual style of man,” she said. “He was skinny! And pale! And computerish! But there I stood, thinking, Suppose I unbuttoned my blouse right here in front of the baby window, staring at his mouth the whole time and running the tip of my tongue across my lower lip.”

The candles were not in the broom cupboard but on top of the refrigerator, in a yellowing white box. Even the candles were yellowed, and also a bit warped, but Delia fitted them into the holders anyway. Then she collected the dishes and silver from the kitchen table and dealt them out. Belle proceeded through the baby’s colic, the new parents’ cranky quarrels, her own warm-eyed, cooing sympathy. “I schemed and plotted, I lay in wait,” she said. “I told him my door was always open. Two, three, four o’clock in the morning he would leave that spit-up milk and dirty-diaper smell and find me here in my spaghetti-strap nightie from Victoria’s Secret.”

And to think all this had been going on while Delia was sound asleep! She checked the turkey. It appeared to have caved in around the breastbone. She found the brussels sprouts in their foil pan and set them in the toaster oven at 350 degrees. There were biscuits too, but she would wait to warm those till the very last minute.

“Two weeks ago, Pansy goes back to her mom’s,” Belle said. “Takes Daffodil and leaves. I was in heaven. Didn’t you notice I’ve had this radiant glow about me lately? Oh, Delia, how can you stand it, going without a love life?”

Holding a pack of paper napkins printed all over with pilgrims, Delia paused to reflect upon the question. “Well,” she said, “I do miss hugs, I guess. But nowadays when I think about, um, the rest of it, I just feel sort of perplexed. I think, Why did that seem like such a big deal, once upon a time? But I suppose it’s only-”

The doorbell rang.

“Oh, Lord, we didn’t call off dinner,” Belle said, as if she had not been sitting in the midst of Delia’s preparations. “Shoot! I can’t cope with this! See who’s there, will you, while I try to fix my face.”

As Delia walked through the dining room to the hall, she felt drab and thin and virginal, like somebody’s spinster aunt fulfilling her duties.

It was Vanessa at the door. She wore a leather blazer and blue jeans, and she toted Greggie on one hip. Behind her, just stepping out of their car, were a man and a woman who must have been Belle’s married couple. Delia barely had time to whisper the news to Vanessa-“Henry McIlwain’s gone back to his wife”-before the couple arrived on the porch. “Why! What have we here!” the husband told Greggie. He was young, no more than thirty, but as staid as a middle-aged man, Delia thought, with his receding tuft of black hair and his long black formal overcoat. His wife was a trim, attractive brunette in a tidy red woolen suit that reminded Delia of a Barbie-doll outfit. “I’m Delia Grinstead,” Delia told her. “This is Vanessa Linley-do you know each other?-and Greggie.”

“We’re the Hawsers,” the husband said for both of them. “Donald and Melinda.”

“Won’t you come in?”

She planned to lead them into the living room, but when she turned she found Belle at the door of the dining room. She was showing all her teeth and adjusting the plunging neckline of a flowered, button-front dress. “Happy Thanksgiving!” she sang out. Whatever repairs she had made to her face had not done much good. Gray tracks still ran down her cheeks, and her eyes were pink and puffy. But she caroled, “So glad you could come! Step in and have a seat!”

There was nowhere to sit but around the table. “Donald, you’re on my right,” Belle said, “and Vanessa’s on my left. I’ve put Greggie next to you, Vanessa. Get some phone books from the kitchen if he needs a booster. And Melinda’s on the other side of Greggie.”

Well, maybe this was the local custom: proceeding directly to the food. But even Vanessa seemed taken aback. And the husband (still wearing his overcoat) stood frozen in place for a moment before approaching his chair. “Are we… late?” he asked Belle.

“Late! Not at all!” she said, and she let out a cascade of musical laughter. “Delia, you’ll sit next to-”

She broke off. “Oh!” she cried. “Delia! Honestly!”

“What’s the matter?” Delia asked.

“You’ve gone and laid too many places!”

It was true. Delia had doled out all she’d found on the kitchen table, and that must have included a setting for Henry McIlwain. Belle gazed toward the chair at the far end, her eyes brimming over with fresh tears.

“I’m sorry,” Delia told her. “We could just-”

“Run fetch Mr. Lamb,” Belle ordered.

“Mr. Lamb? From upstairs?”

“Hurry, though. We’re all waiting. Tell him we’ll eat without him if he doesn’t get down here pronto.”

What they would have eaten Delia couldn’t imagine, since there wasn’t a morsel of food anywhere in sight. But Vanessa, returning from the kitchen with several phone books, told Delia, “Go ahead. I’ll get the meal on.”

Delia went out to the hall, which seemed very quiet after the bustle in the dining room. With the cat twining underfoot, she climbed the stairs and knocked on Mr. Lamb’s door. “Desperately, the salmon fling themselves against the current,” a stern voice announced. The door opened on a sliver of Mr. Lamb’s rag-and-bone face. “Yes?” he said, and then, “Oh!” for George had somehow managed to wriggle through the crack.

Delia said, “Belle sent me up to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“But it seems your animal’s got into my room!”

“Sorry,” Delia said. “Here, George.”

She reached in for the cat, and Mr. Lamb grudgingly opened the door another few inches. Delia caught the hazelnut smell of clothes worn once and then stuffed into drawers unwashed. The television’s icy light flickered in the dimness. She scooped George up and backed away.

“I’ve been meaning to mention the toilet arrangements under the bathroom sink,” Mr. Lamb told her.

“The…?”

“Couldn’t your animal use the outdoors?”

“Not in the middle of the night,” Delia said. She clutched George more tightly and asked, “Are you coming to dinner, or aren’t you?”

“What time?”

“Um… now?”

“Well, I suppose I could make it,” Mr. Lamb said.

He looked down at what he was wearing-a limp T-shirt, baggy dark pants-and then sadly closed the door in her face.

Delia wondered how a man so fond of nature programs could object to a harmless cat.

Downstairs, Vanessa had finished setting everything on the table-turkey, brussels sprouts, cranberry relish, mashed sweet potatoes dotted with marshmallows, all in their original pans. Still wearing her leather blazer, she was spooning the stuffing out of the turkey. Greggie lolled on the stack of phone books, sucking his thumb and watching his mother with heavy-lidded eyes. It must be naptime.

Belle was discussing Henry with the Hawsers. “What I can’t figure,” she was saying, “is when all this came about. Last night as of ten o’clock, everything was jim-dandy. Henry and I had a real nice dinner over in Ocean City. Then this noon on the phone-poof! He’s a totally changed man.”

“So his wife showed up in the morning,” Donald Hawser said sagely. He had draped his coat over the back of his chair, and he was lighting the warped candles with a silver lighter. “She got out of bed this morning and, ‘Here I am,’ she must have said, ‘away from home on Thanksgiving. A family holiday,’ she said.”