Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

“You won’t tell Mr. Miller you saw us here, will you?” Kim asked. Kim was one of Delia’s remedial pupils; lately, Delia had been volunteering as a math tutor over at the school. “He would kill us if he found out!”

“We’re cutting class,” Marietta put in. “We saw you in here and we figured we’d ask: you know how Mr. Miller’s birthday is coming up.”

Delia hadn’t known, but she nodded. Anything to get rid of them.

“So a bunch of us are chipping in on a present, and we thought you might could tell us what to buy him.”

“Oh! Well…”

“I mean, you know him better than anyone. He doesn’t smoke, does he? Seems like a lot of gifts for guys are smokers’ stuff.”

“He doesn’t smoke, no,” Delia said.

“Not even a pipe?”

“Not even a pipe.”

“He’s always so, you know, distinguished and all, we think he’d look great with a pipe. Maybe we should just get him one anyways.”

“No, I really think he would hate that,” Delia said firmly. “Well! It was good seeing you girls.”

But Kim was studying Carroll now from beneath her long silky lashes. “You don’t go to Old Underwear,” she informed him.

Carroll flushed and said, “Underwear?”

“Our high school: Dorothy Underwood,” she said, snapping her gum. “You must be from out of town.”

“Yeah.”

“I knew we hadn’t seen you around.”

Delia started eating her coleslaw; she felt it would be a kindness not to look at Carroll’s face. But Carroll just picked up the ketchup and squirted it thoroughly and methodically over every single one of his french fries. “Well…,” Kim said at last, and the two of them moved on toward an empty booth, trailing crumbs of remarks behind them. “Thanks anyhow, Dee…,” they said, and, “If you think of something…”

Delia took a sip of Coke.

“So who’s the guy?” Carroll asked, setting down the ketchup with a thump.

Confused, she glanced around the café.

“The guy with the pipe, Mom. The oh-so-distinguished guy that you know so extremely-emely well.”

“Oh,” she said. She laughed, not quite naturally. “It’s nothing like that! He’s my boss.”

“Right.”

He pushed his plate away. “It all fits together now,” he said. “No wonder you weren’t home for Labor Day.”

“Labor Day?”

“Dad said you’d be back by then, but I guess it’s pretty clear now why you weren’t.”

She stared at him. “Dad said I’d be back by Labor Day?”

“He said you just needed some time to yourself and you’d come home at the end of the summer. We were counting on it. He promised. Susie thought we should go get you, but he said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘leave her be. I guarantee she’ll be here for our Labor Day picnic,’ he said. And look what happened: you went back on your word.”

“My word!” Delia cried. “That was his word! I didn’t have a thing to do with it! And what right was it of his, I’d like to know? Who is he to guarantee when I’ll be home?”

“Now, Mom,” Carroll said in an undertone. He glanced furtively toward Rick. “Let’s not make a big thing of this, okay? Try and calm down.”

“Don’t you tell me to calm down!” she cried, and at the same time she caught herself wondering exactly how often she had uttered that sentence before. Don’t you tell me to calm down! And, I am completely cool and collected. But to Sam; not to Carroll. Oh, it all came back to her now: that sense of being the wrong one, the flighty, unstable, excitable one. (And the more she protested, of course, the more excitable she appeared.) She gripped the edge of the table with both hands and said, “I am completely cool and collected.”

“Well, fine,” Carroll told her. “I’m glad to hear it.” And he picked up a red-soaked french fry and threaded it into his mouth with elaborate indifference.

I’m glad to hear it was one of Sam’s favorite responses. Along with If you say so, Dee, and Have it your way. After which he might serenely turn a page, or he would start talking with the boys about some unrelated subject. Always so sure he was right; and the fact was, he was right, generally. When he criticized people she liked, she would suddenly notice their faults; and when he criticized Delia, she saw herself all at once as the foolish little whiffet he believed her to be. Like now, for instance: he had promised she would slink home by summer’s end, and the picture of that humbled return was so convincing that she almost felt it had happened. She couldn’t even desert properly! Had only been off in a pout, anyhow. Just needed to get it out of her system.

Although, in fact, she had not slunk home. Not by summer’s end and not afterward. Not to this day. She had actually made a life for herself in a town Sam had nothing to do with.

So when Belle sailed in, calling, “Hey, Dee, I thought that was you I saw,” Delia made a point of rising to give her a flamboyant hug.

“Belle!” she cried, and Belle (her purple-clad figure a luxurious, pillowy armful) had the grace to hug her back.

“Who’s your new fella?” she asked.

“This is my son Carroll. This is Belle Flint,” she told Carroll. She kept an arm around Belle’s waist. “How’re you doing, Belle?”

“Well, you’re never going to guess what, not in a million years.”

“What?” Delia asked, a little too enthusiastically.

“Swear you won’t tell Vanessa, now. This is just between the two of us.”

But the whole demonstration went for nothing, because just then Carroll stood up and pushed his way out of the booth. “So long,” he mumbled, head down.

“Carroll?”

She dropped her arm from Belle’s waist.

“Tomorrow night,” Belle was saying, “I’ve asked Horace Lamb to the movies.”

Horace Lamb? Delia felt an inner hitch of surprise even as she went hurrying after Carroll. He lunged out the café door. “Carroll, honey!” she called.

On the sidewalk, Teensy was mincing toward them beneath a gigantic new busby of exploding red ringlets. Carroll almost ran her down. Teensy said, “Oh!” and took a step back, reaching up to feel for her hairdo as if she feared it might have toppled off. “Delia, tell me the truth,” she said. “Do you honestly think I look silly?”

“Not a bit,” Delia told her. “Carroll, wait!”

Carroll wheeled, his eyebrows beetling. “Never mind me, just tend to your pals!” he said. “Orphan Annie here and Mr. Distinguished and little Tee-hee Boy and Veranda or whoever…”

Vanessa, Delia almost corrected him, while behind her, Teensy asked, “Delia? Is everything all right?” and Belle, in the doorway, said, “Kids. But that’s just how they are, I guess.”

“I was going to do you a favor,” Carroll said.

“What, honey?”

“I was going to tip you off to what’s going on at home, but never mind. Just never mind now,” he said.

Still, he didn’t turn and leave. He seemed to be suspended, teetering on the squeaky rubber soles of his gym shoes. Cannily, Delia came no closer. She stayed six or eight feet away from him, her face a mask of smoothness. “What’s going on at home?” she asked him.

“Oh, nothing. Not a thing! Except that your own blood sister is making a play for your husband,” he said.

“Eliza?”

“And Dad’s so out of it, he just laughs it off when we tell him. But we’ve all noticed, me and Susie and Ramsay notice plain as day, and we can guess how it’s going to end up, we bet, too.”

“Eliza would never do that,” Delia said, but she was trying out the notion even as she spoke. She cast her mind back to the living-room couch, the row of marriageable maidens. Whenever I hear the word “summer” I smell this sort of melting smell. And now it seemed that Sam sent Eliza a quick, alert, appreciative glance, as he had not done in real life. It wasn’t impossible, Delia saw.