Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Sam set down his spoon. Linda gave a sudden sigh. Delia said, “Well, I… well, why don’t I come with you? I doubt I’d be much help, but certainly I could try.”

“Oh, God, thank you, Miz G.,” Driscoll said.

“I don’t know if this will work, though,” Delia told him.

“It’ll work,” he said, standing up. “If school lets out, say, two forty-five, three o’clock, and I come pick you up by…”

That wasn’t what Delia had meant. She’d meant that in her opinion, Susie might reasonably refuse to marry him even after he apologized. But she changed her mind about saying so. She didn’t even say goodbye to him, because just as he was leaving, the telephone rang.

This time it was Joel. He said, “Delia?”

“Yes,” she said evenly. She glanced toward her family. They were all watching her-everyone but Sam, who seemed to be studying the table.

“Where are you?” he asked.

This was such an illogical question that she couldn’t think how to answer it. She said, “Um…”

Where are you? Sam had asked in another phone call, months ago, and she wondered now if he had meant the question in the same way Joel did.

Then Joel, as if recollecting himself, said, “I came home to have lunch with Noah and he told me you haven’t left Baltimore yet. I just thought I should find out if everything’s all right.”

“Oh, yes. Fine,” she said.

She wished the others would resume talking, but they didn’t

“But you do plan to be back, don’t you?” Joel asked. “I mean, eventually? Because I see from your closet… I wasn’t trying to pry but I did just, so to speak, glance in your closet, and I noticed all your clothes are gone.”

“They are?” she said.

“I thought you might have left for good.”

“Oh, no, it’s just… things are taking longer to finish than I expected,” she told him.

Sam rose and walked out of the room.

From upstairs, Susie called, “Mom? Mom?”

“It’s not the realtor!” Delia called back.

Joel said, “Pardon?”

“Sorry, Joel, I’d better go,” she said. “See you in a while.”

She hung up.

“Well, aren’t you the popular one,” Linda said.

Delia gave what she hoped was an offhand laugh and started clearing the table.

It was true, she saw when she went upstairs, that she had brought all her clothes. Well, not really all. Joel would have found enough in her bureau to reassure him, if he’d looked. But what with one thing and another-the iffy season, the dither over a wedding outfit-she had packed as if she’d be gone for days. She pictured Joel standing in front of her closet, his broad forehead creased in perplexity as he surveyed the empty hangers. Abruptly, she closed her suitcase and snapped the latches shut.

Then she crossed the hall to Sam’s room. Here she had left plenty behind. How odd that when she was debating what to wear for the ceremony, she hadn’t considered her old wardrobe! Or maybe not so odd-all that froufrou and those nursery pastels. She turned away. She went to her bureau and found, in the top drawer, a draggled blue hair bow, safety pins, ticket stubs, everything hazed with talcum powder. A pair of sunglasses missing one lens. A fifty-five-cent hand-lotion coupon. A torn-out photo of a fashion model in a stark, bare sliver of black. She couldn’t imagine ever wearing such a style, and she studied the photo for some time before recalling that it was the model who’d caught her eye, not the dress. The sickle-shaped model with the same snooty haircut as Rosemary Bly-Brice.

Footsteps climbed the stairs, and she closed the drawer as stealthily as a thief. She turned and found Sam halting in the doorway. “Oh!” she said, and he said, “I was just-”

They both broke off.

“I thought you were seeing patients,” she said.

“No, I’m through for the day.”

He put his hands in his trouser pockets. Should she leave? But he was filling the doorway; it would have been awkward.

“Mostly now I keep just morning hours,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of patients anymore. Seems half of them have died of old age. Mrs. Harper, Mrs. Allingham…”

“Mrs. Allingham died?”

“Stroke.”

“Oh, dear, I’m going to miss her,” Delia said.

Sam very kindly did not point out that she’d lost all touch with Mrs. Allingham sixteen months ago.

His bed was made, but like most men, he seemed unable to grasp the concept of tucking a fold of spread beneath the pillows. Instead, a straight line of fabric slanted dismally toward the headboard. Just for something to do, Delia set about fixing it. She turned down the spread and whacked both pillows into shape.

“I guess you think I’ve destroyed your father’s practice,” Sam told her.

“Pardon?”

“I’ve run it down to a shadow of its former glory, isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

“It’s not your fault if people die of old age,” Delia said.

“It’s my fault if no one new signs on, though,” he said. “I lack your father’s bedside manner, obviously. I tell people they have plain old indigestion; I don’t call it dyspepsia. I’ve never been the type to flatter and cosset my patients.”

Delia felt a familiar twinge of annoyance. I would hardly consider “dyspepsia” flattery, she could have said. And, I don?t know why you have to use that bitter, biting tone of voice any time you talk about my father. She stalked around to the other side of the bed.

But then Sam asked, “What is that limp you’ve got?”

“Limp?”

“It seems to me you’re favoring one foot.”

“Oh, that’s from a couple of months ago. It’s almost healed by now.”

“Sit down a minute.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, and he came over to kneel in front of her and slip her shoe off. His fingertips moved across the top of her foot with a knowledgeable, deft precision that shot directly to her groin.

In her softest voice, she told him, “Your patients never minded, that I was aware of. They always called you a saint.”

“They don’t anymore,” he said. He was gazing out the window while he traced a tendon, as if he expected to hear the injury rather than see it. “The other night Mrs. Maxwell phoned with one of her stomach problems, and I told her, ’If I let myself think about it, Mrs. Maxwell, I could list quite a few complaints of my own. My eyes burn and my head aches and my knee is acting up,’ I said. Which of course offended her. It seems I’ve lost my tolerance. Or maybe I was never all that tolerant to begin with. I don’t have a very… wide nature. I’m short on, you might call it, jollity.”

The very word, in connection with Sam, made Delia smile, but he was prodding her ankle now, and he didn’t notice. “Does this hurt? This?” he asked.

“A little.”

She thought of how Joel had held her foot in exactly this way. But Joel’s touch had felt so foreign, so separate from her-not quite real, even, it seemed as she looked back.

“I suppose that’s why I married you,” Sam was saying. Had she missed something? “You were extremely jolly when we met,” he said. “Or more like… lighthearted. Now I see that I chose you for all the wrong reasons.”

She drew back slightly.

“There you sat on that couch,” he said, “next to your two scary sisters. Eliza preaching sea kelp and toxic doses of vitamins; Linda tossing off words like louche and distingué. But you were so shy and cute and fumbly, smiling down at your little glass eyecup of sherry. You were so wavery around the edges. You I’d be able to handle, I thought, and I never stopped to ask why I needed to believe that.”

He dropped her foot and sat back on his heels. “Stand up, please,” he told her. She stood. He narrowed his eyes. “It does seem there’s a bit of swelling,” he said. “I would guess you’ve torn a ligament. Ligaments can be very slow to mend. How’d you do it?”