Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

She returned to the kitchen, feeling more cheerful. “Grandfather, let’s take a trip,” she said.

“A what?”

“A trip.”

“But we don’t have any leads right now, Justine.”

“Why wait for leads? Oh, why won’t anyone do anything? Are we just going to sit here? Am I going to get rooted to the living room couch?”

Her grandfather watched her, with his eyes wide and blank and his hands endlessly drying an Exxon coffee mug on the corner of his apron.

Justine took her grandfather to an afternoon concert in Palmfield, although she did not like classical music and her grandfather couldn’t hear it. The two of them sat rigid in their seats, directing unblinking blue stares toward the outline of a set of car keys in the violin’s soloist’s trouser pocket. Then they went home by bus with Justine as dissatisfied as ever, bored and melancholy. Each time strangers rose to leave she mourned them. Who knew in what way they might have affected her life?

She took Duncan, her grandfather, and Ann-Campbell Britt to the funeral of a chihuahua belonging to an old lady client. “ What is this? Where are we going?” her grandfather kept asking. “Don’t worry, just come,” said Justine. “Why do you care? Just grab up your hearing aid and come, Grandfather. If you want things to happen you have to run a few blind errands, you know.” So he came, grumbling, and they sat on folding chairs in a cow pasture that had recently been turned into a pets’ memorial garden. “The casket cost one hundred and forty-five dollars,” Justine whispered to Duncan. “It’s all metal. But they could have settled for wood: thirty-two ninety-eight. Mrs. Bazley told me. She selected the hymns herself. The minister is fully ordained.”

“Oh, excellent,” said Duncan. “I wonder if he needs an assistant,” and after the service he went up and offered Arthur Milsom’s address to the minister. But Grandfather Peck wandered among the wreaths and urns looking baffled. Why had he been brought here? Justine could no longer tell him. She rode home beside Duncan without a word, swinging one foot and rapidly chewing coffee beans that she had taken to keeping in a tin container at the bottom of her bag.

On Sundays she drove her grandfather to Plankhurst for Quaker meetings, which used to be something she tried to get out of because she didn’t like sitting still so long. Now she would go anywhere. Grandfather Peck was not, of course, a Quaker and had no intention of becoming one, but he resented regular church services because he claimed the minister wouldn’t speak up. It made him feel left out, he said. Even the Quakers would sometimes take it into their heads to rise and mumble, perversely keeping their faces turned away so that he couldn’t read their lips. Then he whispered, “What? What?”—a harsh sound sawing through the air. He made Justine write everything down for him on a 3 × 5 memo pad he kept in his breast pocket. Justine would click the retractable point of his ballpoint pen in and out, in and out, waiting for a five-minute speech to be over, and then she wrote, “He says that God must have made even Nixon,” or “Peace is not possible as long as neighbors can still argue over a lawn mower.”

“ That took him five minutes?”

“Ssh.”

“But what was he up there working his mouth all that time for?”

“Ssh, Grandfather. Later.”

“You must have left something out,” he told her.

She would hand back his pen and pad, and sigh, and check the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel and run her eyes once more down the rows of straight-backed radiant adults and fidgety children lining the wooden benches. After twenty minutes the children were excused, rising like chirping, squeaking mice to follow the pied piper First-Day School teacher out of the room, breaking into a storm of whistles and shouts and stamping feet before the door was properly shut again. She should have gone with them, she always thought. The silence that followed was deep enough to drown in. She would plow desperately through her straw bag, rustling and jingling, coming up finally with her tin container of coffee beans. When she bit into them, she filled the meetinghouse with the smell of breakfast.

Once her grandfather wrote on the pad himself, several lines of hurried spiky handwriting that he passed to her. “Read this out when no one else is talking,” he whispered. She struggled to her feet, hanging onto her hat. Anything to break the silence. “My grandfather wants me to read this,” she said. “ ‘I used to think that heaven was — palatable? Palatial. I was told it had pearly gates and was paved with gold. But now I hope they are wrong about that. I would prefer to find that heaven was a small town with a bandstand in the park and a great many trees, and I would know everybody in it and none of them would ever die or move away or age or alter.’ ”

She sat down and gave him back the memo pad. She took the top off her coffee beans but then she put it on again, and kept the container cupped in her hands while she gazed steadily out the window into the sunlit trees.

One afternoon toward the end of May the doorbell rang and Justine, flying to answer it, found Alonzo Divich standing on the porch. Although it was hot he wore a very woolly sheepskin vest. He carried a cowboy hat, swinging by a soiled string. “Alonzo!” Justine said.

“I was afraid you might have moved,” he told her.

“Oh no. Come in.”

He followed her into the hall, shaking the floor with each step. Grandfather Peck was on the living room couch writing a letter to his daughters. “Don’t get up,” Alonzo called to him, although the grandfather was still firmly seated, giving him that stare of shocked disbelief he always wore for Alonzo. “How’s the heart, eh?” Alonzo asked. “How’s the heart?”

“Hearth?”

“Nothing’s wrong with his heart,” said Justine. “Come into the kitchen, Alonzo, if you want your cards read. You know I can’t do it right with Grandfather watching.”

While she cleared the remains of breakfast from the table, Alonzo wandered around the kitchen examining things and whistling. “Your calendar is two months ahead,” he told Justine.

“Is it?”

“Most people’s would be behind.”

“Yes, well.”

She went to the living room for her carry-all. When she returned Alonzo was standing at the open refrigerator, looking into a bowl of moldy strawberries. “How is my friend Duncan?” he asked her.

“He’s fine.”

“Maybe I’ll drop by and see him. Is Meg out of school yet?”

“She’s married.”

“Married.”

“She eloped with that minister.”

“I’m sorry, Justine.”

He shut the refrigerator and sat down at the table to watch her shuffle the cards. He looked tired and hot, and the grooves alongside his mustache were silvered with sweat. A disk with Arabic lettering gleamed in the opening of his shirt. Last time it had been a turquoise cross. She didn’t ask why; he wouldn’t have answered. “Alonzo,” was all she said, “you have no idea how it gladdens my heart to see you. Cut, please.” He cut the cards. She laid them out, one by one. Then she looked up. “Well?” she asked.

Alonzo said, “You realize, last time I took your advice.”

“You did?”

“When you told me not to sell the business.”

“Oh yes. Well, I should hope so,” said Justine.

“It was the first time you ever said to keep on with something I was already doing.”