Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

Mr Stevens himself washed the windshield and filled the tank, with only a brief smile to James because he didn't recognize him. "Three dollars, ten,' he said. 'Nice evening.' He held his hand out flat, palm up, outside James's window, and James counted out the exact change very slowly. When he had paid he said, 'This the road to Caraway?' to stretch the stop out even longer.

'Sure is,' the man said.

'How much further?'

'Be there half an hour.'

'Thank you,' James said. He started the motor and looked over at Mrs Pike, but she didn't seem surprised at the questions he had asked. She just looked down at her hands and waited for him to drive on.

Almost no one else was on the road now. He drove at a steady pace, and in silence, looking at the country around him whenever they were on a straight stretch of road. At first it was just the occasional, very noticeable things that he recognized – that humped bridge that looked like something off a willowware plate, the funny barbecue house off in the middle of nowhere with pigs chasing each other rapidly in neon lights across the front porch. But after another ten or fifteen minutes, he began to recognize everything. The objects that flashed by were all worn and familiar-looking, as if perhaps without knowing it he had been dreaming of them nightly. Even the new things – the brick ranch houses rising baldly out of fresh red clay, the drive-ins and Dairy Queens – seemed familiar, and he glanced at them mildly and without surprise. When he reached the town limits it was just beginning to grow really dark, and his headlights glared briefly against the slick white surface of a newly painted sign. 'Caraway. Bird Sanctuary,' it read. The last time he had been here it had said only 'Caraway.' And he had looked at it and thought, I'll never see that sign again, not for any reason. He hadn't known the Pikes then, nor Joan, nor the Potters; he hadn't foreseen the existence of Simon.

He slowed down as soon as they reached the actual town, and Mrs Pike straightened up and began looking out the window more intently, perhaps already searching for Simon. James kept his eyes straight ahead until they got to Main Street. Then he pointed to an all-night grill and said, 'This is where the buses stop.'

'Oh,' said Mrs Pike.

'Do you want to go ask if they've seen him?'

'I guess so,' she said, but she was looking at him, obviously expecting that he would be the one to ask. He sighed and swung the truck into a diagonal parking place.

'I'll be right out,' he told her.

'All right.'

Once on the street, out from behind the shield of the pickup, he felt clumsy and conspicuous. Girls in bare-backed dresses waited with their dates in front of the movie theatre next door and when he stepped on to the sidewalk they pivoted on their high heels and glanced over at him. He stared back, but there was no one he recognized. And the waitress in the grill was a new one a fat blonde he didn't know. He came up and laid both hands palm down on the counter and said, 'Were you here when the last bus from Larksville came?'

'Yes,' she said. Her voice was tired, and she seemed hardly able to raise her eyes and look at him.

'Did you see a little boy get off?'

'I wasn't watching,' she said.

She began swabbing off the counter with a pink sponge, and James walked out again without thanking her. On the street he looked up and down, hooking his thumbs in his belt and staring over the heads of passersby, but there was no sign of Simon. For the first time he felt uncertain about him, and frightened. He returned to the truck.

'She wasn't watching,' he told Mrs Pike.

'She wasn't,' she agreed, and went on looking calmly out the window.

James knew where he was heading, but he was hoping he didn't have to go there. So he drove down Main Street very slowly, looking right and left, peering into the windows of restaurants and soda shops and scanning the faces of people out for evening walks. Several times he saw people he knew. Seen through the truck window, walking in half-dark, six years older and unexpected in new clothes that James had never known, they looked worn and sad to him. He would look after them a minute with a feeling of bewilderment, almost forgetting Simon until Mrs Pike touched him on the arm. Then he would drive on.

Mrs Pike didn't ask what he was doing when he turned off Main Street. She seemed to think that this was part of a tour around Caraway that anyone might follow, and she gazed in tourist-like respect at a three-foot high statue of Major John Caraway. ('This is Major Caraway,' James's father always explained to them. 'He fought in the Big War.' Meaning the Civil War, though there'd been others since. 'He certainly was a small man,' said their mother. Their father never answered that.) Even when they turned down Hampden Street, where there were no statues and only private houses, Mrs Pike said nothing. She kept on searching the sides of the road, poking her nose toward the window so that the skin between her chin and the base of her throat made one slanted line. James drove more and more slowly. He turned left on Winton Lane and then drew to a stop, letting the truck roll into the grass at the side of the road. They were in front of an old grey house with a great many gables, its yard sprinkled with the feather-white skeletons of dandelions. No one was on the porch. For a while James sat silent, tapping the steering wheel with one finger. Then he looked over at Mrs Pike. She was still searching out the window, almost as if she thought they were still moving. 'I'll be back,' he told her.

'All right.'

He opened the truck door and climbed out stiffly, careful not to make too much noise. But no dog barked. In his mind, he saw now, he had pictured the dog's barking first. He had imagined that everyone would come to the doer to investigate, long before he had reached the front steps; he had seen the long rectangle of yellow light from the doorway and the silhouettes of many people, watching as he' walked awkwardly through the dandelions. Yet he came to the door in utter silence, with no one noticing. He opened the screen, which creaked, and knocked several times on the weatherbeaten wooden door and waited. For a while no one came. Then there were footsteps, and he stepped back a pace. He fixed his eyes on a point just a little above his own eye level, where he would see that hard white face as soon as the door opened.

But when the door did open, he had to look lower than that. He had to look down to the level of his shoulders, much lower than he had remembered, into the old man's small lined face and his eyes in their pockets of bone. His hair was all white now, gleamingly clean. He wore suspenders, snapped over a frayed white collarless shirt which was only folded shut, without buttons. And his trousers bagged at the knees.

The dog didn't bark,' said James.

'She died,' his father said, and stepped back a step to let him into the house.

The first thing Simon said was, 'if I'd known you were coming, I'd of hitched a ride with you.' He was sitting in old Mr Green's platform rocker, with his elbows resting lightly on the arms of it and his fingers laced in front of him. 'Did you just leave home and not tell anyone?' he asked.

'I told everyone,' said James, and looked straight across at the others. They stood in a line behind Simon, the three of them – his father, Claude, and Clara, the one brother and sister still at home. They were standing very still, all three of them in almost exactly the same position, with their eyes on James. When James looked at them Simon turned around and looked too, and just in that one turn of his head, with his chin pointed upwards and the shock of hair falling back off his forehead, he seemed to be claiming them somehow marking them as his own. James's father looked down at him soberly, and Clara smiled, but by then Simon had turned to James again and couldn't see her. 'I came on a bus,' he said.