Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

It seemed to him, now that he stopped to consider, that if he wanted things to be smoothed over again it would have to be he who took the first step. Joan wouldn't. She would never change her mind about Ansel or even pretend to, in order to make things easier. He would have to go over and say, 'Well, however we feel, I'm sorry that fight happened,' or else she would just stay quietly in her own house, playing games with Simon and occupying herself with little private chores until she died. And all over nothing. He tucked her picture back into the file. Mr Pike was always saying, 'Someday, boy, that girl is going to walk off and leave you,' and he didn't know how right he was. Last month

Joan had packed her things and gone downtown to catch a bus for home, but then she had decided she might as well go to a movie first and by the time the movie was over she had changed her mind and come home again, dragging two big suitcases behind her and hobbling along on her dressup shoes. She had told James about it, laughing at herself as she told it, but James hadn't laughed with her. If she were to go, what would he decide to do about it?

Out in the living room, he could hear Miss Lucy discussing her nephew, who was a missionary in Japan and a great curiosity there because of his red hair. 'You ought to see him bow,' she said. 'They bow all the time, he tells me…' James half-listened, drumming his fingers on the steel file drawer.

If Joan were to go, he had only two choices. That was the way he saw it. He could let her be, and spend the next forty years remembering nothing but the way she used to walk across the fields with him from the tobacco barns and the peppermint smell of her breath when she kissed him good night. Or he could go after her and say, 'Come back. And will you marry me?' In his mind he could say that, but not in real life. In real life he had Ansel, and would have him always because he couldn't walk out on that one, final member of his family that he hadn't yet deserted. And in real life, he could never make Joan and Ansel like each other.

'I'll take Africa any day,' Miss Faye was saying. 'Africans know they need a missionary, but these Easterners are eternally surprised.' And Miss Lucy chirped something at the end, but James couldn't hear what she said.

He stood up and rubbed his knees where they ached from being bent so long. Then he picked up the pictures for the paper and left the dark-room. Instead of going out through the front he crossed to the back door, in order to make his escape as quickly as possible. Outside, his eyes searched out those daisies he had been meaning to pick, blowing in the wind and about to be too old. He tucked the pictures under his arm and went deeper into the field, heading toward the tallest ones. It always made him feel silly, picking flowers. He didn't mind doing it (Joan liked daisies far better than bought flowers, or any other kind of present), but he didn't like thinking that anyone might be watching. In case someone was, he picked very offhandedly – yanking the daisies up nearly by their roots, jumbling them together helter-skelter without looking at them. But while he was rounding the side of the house and heading toward the front yard he arranged them more carefully, and held them up to see if they were all right.

Mrs Hammond's car was gone; that was one good thing. She must have left while he was in the darkroom. Now all he wanted was for Joan to be the one to answer the door. He knocked and waited, frowning tensely at the screen. For a long time nobody came. Then from somewhere else in the house, Joan called, 'Was that a knock?' Her voice echoed; she must have been standing at the head of the stairs.

'It's me,' James said.

'Simon, will you let James in?'

Simon came out of the kitchen, dragging his feet. Through the screen, all James saw of him was his silhouette – his spidery arms and legs, his shoulders hunched up as if he were scared of something. Before he reached the door he stopped and said, 'You come by yourself?'

'Who would I be bringing?' asked James.

'Oh, no one.' And he came the rest of the way to the door and pushed it open. 'Joan's upstairs,' he said, 'putting Mama to bed. She'll be down.'

'Your mother got up already?'

'Well, but now she's going back to bed. I said everything all wrong.'

'I'll bet you didn't,' said James, without being quite sure what he was talking about. He closed the door very softly behind him and went over to a chair. 'Is Joan too busy to talk?'

But just then they heard Joan coming downstairs, walking on tiptoe and taking only one step at a time where usually she took two. Simon jerked his thumb toward the sound. 'Here she is,' he said. When Joan came into view she looked at James blankly a minute, as if she'd forgotten he was here, and then she smiled and said, 'Oh. Hello.'

'Hello,' James said. He stood up and held out the flowers. 'I brought you some daisies. I was walking through the field and happened to come across them.'

'That was nice,' she said, and then frowned at the daisies.

James looked at them. They seemed old and draggled now, in a messy little cluster in his hand. 'They're not all that special, I guess,' he said, but Joan had come out of her thoughts. 'I think they're fine,' she said. 'I'll get a vase.'

'Oh, you don't have to get a vase for them -'

'Well, of course I do.'

She went out into the kitchen, still seeming to walk on tiptoe. Now that James thought of it, there was an uneasy silence about this house. He couldn't tell if it was because of something to do with Mrs Pike or because Joan was still mad at him and he didn't know how to ask. He looked across at Simon, who was still standing and staring into space. 'Did I come at a bad time?' James asked him.

'Huh?'

Joan came back, carrying a cut-glass vase full of water. He asked her, 'Did I come at a bad time?'.

'Oh, not really.'

'Well, did I or didn't I?'

'It's all right,' Joan told him. 'Aunt Lou didn't feel well this morning, but she's upstairs now and everything's all right.' She took the daisies from him. Her hands when they brushed his were cool and impersonal, and she didn't look at him. 'We have to go gradually,' she said. 'I keep forgetting that. I don't seem to have a light touch with anything.' Yet her fingers when she arranged the flowers were as light and gentle as butterflies, and the daisies stood up or bent gracefully over the minute she touched them. When she was done they had stopped looking draggled; James was glad now that he had brought them.

'You ought to work for a florist,' he told her.

But she set the vase down on a table without even noticing how they looked. She hadn't glanced at them once, all the time she was arranging them. 'Mrs Hammond does,' she said. 'Have a light touch, I mean. But I'm not sure that's the kind I'm talking about right now.'

'I don't know that I follow you,' James said.

She shook her head and sat down, as if she had given up on him. 'Never mind,' she said.

'Mrs Hammond has a light touch?'

'Never mind.' She looked suddenly at Simon. 'Simon, do you want lunch?' she asked him.

'I just had breakfast.'

'Oh.'

'You have a light touch,' James said. 'You have the lightest touch of anyone I know.'

'Oh, James, you don't know.'

'Well, I'm trying -'He stopped and glanced toward Simon. It seemed to him Simon looked cold. 'Don't you want to sit down?' he asked.

'I'm okay.'

'Come on.'

Simon shrugged and sat down on the couch. Now that they were all seated here, facing each other and keeping their hands folded in their laps, it seemed more awkward than before. It seemed they should be having a conversation of some kind, something that made sense. Not these little jagged bits of words. He tried smiling at Joan but all she did was smile back, using only her mouth while her eyes stayed serious and maybe even angry; he didn't know. 'Would you rather I come back another time?' he asked.