Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

That made James look up, but he didn't say anything. Instead he snapped the picture and frowned over at the lamps, measuring how much light there was. 'Outdoors would've been better,' he said finally.

'I also hear,' said Simon, 'that they sing all night in the dark. And them plumed hats, why, even the mules wear them. With holes cut for ears.'

'Look over toward your left,' James said.

"There's six buses going there a day, Ansel told me.'

James folded his arms across the top of the camera and watched Simon a minute, thinking. Simon stared straight back at him. In the light from the lamps his eyes seemed black, and it was hard to see beyond the flat surface of them. His chin was tilted outward a little, and his lashes with their sunbleached tips gleaming were like curtains over his expression. Who knew what was in his mind? James uncrossed his arms then and said, ‘Put your cigar, away, now. This last one's for your mother.'

'Aw, my mother won't even -'

'She wants a picture she can show to the relatives. What would they think, you with a big fat cigar in your hand?'

'She won't -' Simon began again.

But James said, 'You're growing so much, this summer. She wants to get you in a picture before you're too big to fit in one.'

'She tell you that?' asked Simon.

'Why, sure.'

'She ask you out and out for a picture of me?'

'Sure she did,' James said. 'She said, "James, if you got time, I wish you'd snap a picture of Simon. We don't have a picture that looks like him no more." I said I'd try.'

'Well, then,' said Simon after a minute. He rose and crossed over to the mantelpiece, where he laid down the cigar. When he returned to his chair he settled himself very carefully, tugging his jeans down tight into his boots, running both hands hard through his hair to smooth it back. He looked more posed now; the relaxed expression that he had worn in the other pictures was gone. With both hands placed symmetrically on the arms of the chair, his back very straight and his face drawn tight in the beginnings of a smile, he stared unblinkingly into the lens of the camera. James waited a minute, and then he pressed the button and straightened up. 'Thank you,' he said formally.

'Oh, that's all right.'

'I'll have them for you this afternoon, maybe. Or tomorrow, early. Perle Simpson is coming by for a passport photo and I want to take that before I start developing.'

'Okay,' said Simon. He stood up, frowningly tucking in his shirt, and then suddenly he looked over at James and gave him a wide, slow smile, so big that the two dents he was always trying to hide showed up in the centre of his cheeks. 'Well, I'll be seeing you,' he said, and sauntered on out, slamming the screen door behind him. When James went to the window to look after him he saw him in the front yard, picking up the bicycle he hadn't ridden for days and twirling the pedal into a position where he could step on it. The buttercup still hung in the spokes, its little yellow head dangling drunkenly from the front wheel and its withered leaves fluttering out like banners when Simon rode slowly off. He rode in the direction of the Terry's farm; he would be going to see the tobacco pickers, the way he used to do.

When Simon was out of sight, and when James had turned and seen that Ansel was sleeping still, he himself went out the screen door and down the long front porch. The Pikes' window shades were up now. He peered in through the dark screen door and saw Mrs Pike at her sewing machine, not running it at the minute but sewing by hand on something that was in her lap. 'Mrs Pike,' he called gently. She lowered the sewing and looked up at him, her mouth screwed up and lopsided because of the pins in one corner of it. 'Mrs Pike, can I come in a minute?'

'Joan's handing tobacco,' she said. Speaking around the pins made her seem like a different woman, like the waitress at the Royal Crown who always had a cigarette in her mouth when she talked. 'Did you want to see Joan?'

'Well, no, I just wanted to tell you -' said James. He pulled open the screen door and stepped just inside it, even though he hadn't been asked. 'I took a picture of Simon,' he said.

'Oh.'

'Sitting in an easy chair.'

'Well, that's real nice,' said Mrs Pike, and bowed her head to nip a thread off the dress she was sewing.

'Well, I took it for you, Mrs Pike.'

'That's real nice of you,' she said again. She held the dress up at arm's length and frowned at it. James shifted his weight to his other foot.

'What I actually told him,' he said, 'was that you asked for it. Asked me to take it for you.'

She lowered the dress to her lap again and looked over at him, and James thought that surely she would say something now. But when she did speak, all she said was, 'It must be right hard, taking pictures of children'- politely, as if he were a stranger she was trying to make conversation with.

James waited a minute, but she didn't say more. She had lowered her head to her sewing again, fumbling at it with quick, blunt fingers and absentmindedly working the pins from one side of her mouth to the other. So he said, 'Well, ma'am, not really,' and then turned and quietly let himself out the door again. All the way down to his end of the porch he kept thinking of going back and trying once more, but he knew already it wasn't any use. So he entered his own part of the house and then just stood there a minute, thinking it over, watching Ansel as he slept.

The things Joan Pike owned in this world could be packed in two suitcases, with room to spare. She was putting them there now, one by one, folding the skirts in two and laying them gently on the bottom of the big leather suitcase her father's parents had given him to take to a debating contest fifty years ago. Her own suitcase, newer and shinier, stood waiting on the floor already filled and locked. She had saved out her big straw pocketbook, which was hard to pack and could hold all the things she might need on the bus. It stood on the floor, with one corner of a Greyhound ticket envelope sticking out of it. The ticket she had bought this morning, after spending all Wednesday night lying in bed rolling up the hem of her top sheet while she thought what to do. She had ridden into town for it on Simon's bicycle, and come back with it hidden inside her white shirt. Nobody knew she was going.

When her closet was empty she cleaned it out carefully, picking up every stray bobby pin and button from the floor and bunching the hangers neatly at one end of the rod with the hooks all pointing the same way. Mainly she wanted to save her aunt the trouble, but also she wanted to go away feeling that she had left a clean sweep behind her – not a thread, not a scrap of hers remaining that she could want to return for. She would like to have it seem as if she had never been here, if that was possible. So she closed the closet door firmly and turned the key in its lock. Then she began on the rest of the room.

She rolled her silver-backed dresser set in sweaters, so that none of the pieces would get scratched. Seeing the set, which her parents had given her on her eighteenth birthday, made her remember that she should be bringing back presents for them, and she frowned into the mirror when she thought about it. Always before, after two weeks at Scout camp even, she had brought back gifts for each of them and formally presented them, and her parents had done the same. But this time she hadn't thought far enough in advance; she would have to come home empty-handed. The idea bothered her, as if this were some basic point of guest etiquette that she, always a guest, had somehow forgotten. She shook her head, and laid the wrapped silver pieces carefully on top of her skirts.

Out in the back yard Simon was running an imaginary machine gun, shouting 'ta-ta-ta-ta-tat' in a high voice that cracked and aiming at unknowing wrens who sat in the bushes behind the house. She could see him from her window – his foreshortened, blue denim body, the swirl of hair radiating out from a tiny white point on the back of his head. With luck, he wouldn't see her go. He would stay there in the back yard, and his mother would stay in bed for her afternoon nap, and she could sneak out of the house and across the fields without anyone's seeing her. It might even be supper before they noticed. Mr Pike would fuss a little, feeling responsible for his brother's child. Mrs Pike was still too sad to care, but Simon would care. He would ask why she had left without telling them, and how would they answer him? How would she even answer him? 'Because I don't want to think I'm really going,' she would say. It was the first time she had thought that out, in words. She stopped folding a slip and looked down at where Simon sat, with his legs bent under him and the toes of his boots pointing out, sighting along a long straight stick and pulling the trigger. As soon as she got home, she decided, she would telephone to make it all right with him.