Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [64]
"I mean what if I was held to blame for that?" Maggie asked. "Some thirty-year-old . . . kid I don't have the faintest interest in! I'm not the one who designed that dream!" "No, indeed," Mr. Otis said. "And anyways, this here of Duluth's was Duluth's dream. It weren't even me that dreamed it. She claim I was standing on her needlepoint chair, her chair seat she worked forever on, so she order me off but when I stepped down I was walking on her crocheted shawl and her embroidered petticoat, my shoes was dragging lace and ruffles and bits of ribbon. 'If that ain't just like you,' she tell me in the morning, and I say, 'What did do? Show me what I did. Show me where I ever trampled on a one of them things.' She say, 'You are just a mowing-down type of man, Daniel Otis, and if I knew I'd have to put up with you so long I'd have made a more thoughtful selection when I married.' So I say, 'Well, if that's how you feel, I'm leaving,' and she say, 'Don't forget your things,' and off I go." "Mr. Otis has been living in his car these last few days and moving around among relatives," Maggie told Ira.
"Is that right," Ira said.
"So it matters quite a heap to me that my wheel not pop off," Mr. Otis added.
Ira sighed and sat down on the wall next to Maggie. The pretzels were the varnished kind that stuck in his teeth, but he was so hungry that he went on eating them.
Now the ponytailed boy walked toward them, so direct and purposeful in his tap-heeled leather boots that Ira stood up again, imagining they had some business to discuss. But all the boy did was coil the air hose that had been hissing on the concrete all this time without their noticing. In order not to look indecisive, Ira went on over to him anyhow. "So!" he said. "What's the story on this Lamont?" "He's out," the boy told him.
"No chance we could get you to come, I guess. Run you over to the highway in our car and get you to look at Mr. Otis here's wheel for us." "Nope," the boy said, hanging the hose on its hook.
Ira said, "I see." He returned to the wall, and the boy walked back to the station.
"I think it might be Moose Run," Maggie was telling Mr. Otis. "Is that the name? This cutoff that leads into Cartwheel." "Now, I don't know about no Moose Run," Mr. Otis said, "but I have heard tell of Cartwheel. Just can't say right off exactly how you'd get there. See, they's so many places hereabouts that sound like towns, call theyselves towns, but really they ain't much more than a grocery store and a gas pump." "That's Cartwheel, all right," Maggie said. "One main street. No traffic lights. Fiona lives on a skinny little road that doesn't even have a sidewalk. Fiona's our daughter-in-law. Ex-daughter-in-law, I suppose I should say. She used to be our son Jesse's wife, but now they're divorced." "Yes, that is how they do nowadays," Mr. Otis said. "Lament is divorced too, and my sister Florence's girl Sally. I don't know why they bother getting married." Just as if his own. marriage were in perfect health.
"Have a pretzel," Ira said. Mr. Otis shook his head absently but Maggie dug down deep in the bag and came up with half a dozen.
"Really it was all a misunderstanding," she told Mr. Otis. She bit into a pretzel. "They were perfect for each other. They even looked perfect: Jesse so dark and Fiona so blond. It's just that Jesse was working musician's hours and his life was sort of, I don't know, unsteady. And Fiona was so young, and inclined to fly off the handle. Oh, I used to just ache for them. It broke Jesse's heart when she left him; she took their little daughter and went back home to her mother. And Fiona's heart was broken too, I know, but do you think she would say so? And now they're so neatly divorced you would think they had never been married." All true, as far as it went, Ira reflected; but there was a lot she'd left