Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

'I don't suppose it'd make much difference,' Joan said absently.

'Well, maybe not.' She picked up the papers again. 'You bring James over for supper some night, you hear? We haven't had the two of you together in a long time.'

'All right,' said Joan. She didn't see much point in telling Carol she was leaving, not if Carol hadn't noticed for herself. And she hadn't. She went off jauntily, with a wave of her hand, and threw the papers on the floor in front of the magazine rack and left the store. Yet there was Joan, all dressed up in her high-heeled shoes. She looked around at the other customers again, but they went on reading their magazines.

When the bus drew up, she was the only person to board it. The driver didn't smile or even look at her; already she was outside the little circle of Larksville, and only another stranger to the people on this bus. She sat in a seat by herself, toward the rear, and smoothed her skirt down and then looked at the other passengers. None of them looked back except a sailor, who stopped chewing his gum and winked, and she quickly looked away again and sat up straight. The bus started with a jerk and wheezed up to full speed along Main Street, making a sad, going-away noise. Through the green-tinted windows Larksville looked like an old dull photograph, and that made her sad too, but once they had passed the town limits she began to feel better. Some of that light feeling came back. It crossed her mind, as she was pulling on her gloves, that all she was going to was another bedroom, to years spent reading alone in a little house kept by old people, remembering to greet her mother's friends on the street, smiling indulgently at other people's children. But then she shook that thought away, and folded her gloved hands in her lap and began looking out the window again.

It was almost an hour before the bus made its next stop, in a town called Howrell that Joan had always hated. Gangling men stood lined along the street, spitting tobacco juice and commenting on the passengers whose faces appeared in the bus windows. Underneath Joan was the slamming and banging of bags being shoved into the luggage compartment, and then the driver helped a little old lady up the steps and into the bus. She wore a hat made entirely of flowers. From the way she advanced, clutching her pocketbook in both hands, examining the face of each passenger and sniffing a little as she passed them, Joan knew she would sit beside her. Old ladies always did. She stopped next to Joan and said, 'This seat taken?' and then slid in, not waiting for an answer. While she was getting settled she huffed and puffed, making little comments under her breath; she would be the talkative kind. 'I thought this bus would never come,' she said. 'I thought it had laid down and died on the way.' Joan smiled, and turned her face full to the window.

When the bus had started up again, and was rolling through the last of Howrell, Joan checked her watch. It would be nearly suppertime now. If she were in Larksville she would be sitting at the kitchen table cutting up a salad. She pictured herself there, her bare feet curled around the rungs of the chair. In her mind she seemed to be sitting an inch or so above the seat, not resting on anything but air. She ran through other pictures of herself – sitting in her parents' parlour, sitting on the porch with James, even sitting now beside this old lady on a bus rolling west. In all the pictures, she was resting on nothing. She turned her mind back to the firmest seat she knew-James's lap, in the evenings when Ansel had already gone to bed. But even there, there was a good two inches of air beneath her and she seemed to be balanced there precariously, her arms tight around James. She turned away from the window quickly, and said to the old lady, 'It'll be getting dark soon.'

'It certainly will,' said the lady. 'My daughter will be getting supper on now. The married one. I left them a cold hen, barbecued the way I like to do it.'

Joan went back to looking out the window. She stared steadily at the clay banks that rose high and red along the side of the road, and the tall thin tobacco barns from which little strings of brightly dressed women were scattering home for supper. Who would take her place tomorrow at the tobacco table? She stopped watching the barns. All around her in the bus, people were settled firmly in their seats, with their hands relaxed on the arm rests and their heads tipped against the white starched bibs on the backs of the seats. They talked to one another in murmuring voices that mingled with the sound of the motor. A little boy was playing a tonette.

'I'm going to my other daughter,' the old lady told her. 'The one that never married. She has a kidney ailment.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Joan.

'She's in terrible pain, and there's no one to take care of her.'

Out of the corner of her eye Joan saw the Larksville paper she had bought, folded neatly and tucked down between her seat and the wall of the bus. She picked it up quickly and unfolded it, and the old lady turned away again.

There would be nothing interesting in the paper, but she read it anyway. She began with the first page and read through the whole paper methodically, not even skipping the ladies' meeting announcements or the advertisements.

There had been one birth in Larksville this week, she saw, and two deaths. The first death was Jones, Laramie D., whom she had never heard of, but she read all about him anyway – the circumstances of his death, the highlights of his life, the list of relatives who had survived him. The second death was Pike, Janie Rose. The name hit into her stomach, as if she hadn't known of the death until this instant. She started to pass over it, but then she went back to it and read it through:

Pike, Janie Rose. At County Hospital, in her sixth year,

of internal injuries caused by an accident. Beloved

daughter of Mr and Mrs Roy J. Pike, sister of Simon

Lockwood Pike. Funeral was held from Collins

Memorial Home, July 16, interment in family cemetery.

She read it twice, but it seemed unreal still, something vague and far off. Nothing that bad could happen. When she had finished with it a second time she folded the paper very carefully in half, so that the obituaries were out of sight, and then went on to the rest of the paper. She read very closely now, even moving her lips, so as to shut out all thought of anything she had read before. 'Teller-Hokes Wedding Held in First Baptist Church,' she read, and although neither name meant anything to her she was careful to find out exactly what the bride wore and who her guests were. Next came the memorial notices, ringed in black like the obituaries. She had never looked at the memorial notices before. She read about someone named Auntie Peg Myers, who had passed away on July 16,1937, and was dearly remembered by her two nieces. Then she read about Nathan Martin, who had been taken from his wife in 1941. For him there was a quotation. 'Too dearly beloved ever to be forgotten,' it said. Further down, for other people, there were little poems, but Joan stopped reading. She had a sudden picture of all the years of this century, stretching far back in a chain of newsprint that grew yellower and yellower as the years grew older. 1937 was almost orange, older than she herself was; 1941 was growing brittle at the edges. How would this year look? The print on January was already blurred. And then she pictured how it would be when today was yellowed too, years from now, and the Pikes themselves were buried and Simon an old man. Then on the third week in every July he would print his notice: 'In memory of Janie Rose, who passed away just fifty years ago July 13th. Fondly remembered by her brother Simon.' He would be remembering her as someone very small with spectacles, who had lived in the tacked-on bedroom in back of the house. But he himself would be a grandfather then, and nobody Janie would recognize. How would Simon look in fifty years? Joan tried to think, but all she saw was Simon as he was today -hunching his shoulders up, tucking his head down in that uncertain way he had.