Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [10]
“Have some peas,” Lucy told Ian.
“Oh, thanks, I’ll just—”
“Today she bought a teeny-weeny baby hat with blue ribbons but she says if Thomas plays with it he’ll get it dirty,” Agatha said.
Ian looked over at Lucy, and Lucy looked back at him ruefully. She said, “Don’t tell the others, will you?”
“Okay.”
“I want to wait till Claudia gets out of the hospital.”
“My lips are sealed,” he said.
It was a pleasurable moment, sharing a secret with Lucy. The secret itself, though, he wasn’t so sure of. He thought of Danny circling her waist with his hands, his fingertips nearly meeting. Couldn’t he have let her stay as she was? Did everything have to keep marching forward all the time?
She said, “We ought to get going, kids.”
“Well, thanks for the food,” Ian told her.
“You’re very welcome.”
After they left he could have stopped eating—he was already late for supper at Cicely’s—but he worried Lucy would find out somehow and feel hurt. So he made his way through everything, sweating in the candlelight, which was, to tell the truth, sort of uncomfortable for August. She had laid out the ham slices in a careful, scalloped design that reminded him of the patterns etched alongside the ocean. And although it would have saddened him to let the ham go to waste, it saddened him too to finish it and end up with just the empty plate.
Claudia did manage to keep her baby. In fact, she went way past her due date. Her doctor had predicted the first week in December, but things dragged on so long that Ian started betting the baby would arrive on his birthday, January 2. “Oh, please,” Claudia said. “Let’s hope to God you’re wrong.” She was big as a house and her ankles were swollen and she’d had to have her rings cut off with a hacksaw. At Christmas she was still lumbering around, and Christmas dinner was a spectacle, with Claudia and Lucy sitting elbow to elbow in their ballooning maternity smocks. Lucy turned out to be the type who carried her baby a great distance in front of her (something to do with her small frame, perhaps), so that even though she had two months to go, she looked nearly as pregnant as Claudia. She was officially a member of the family now—the honeymoon joyfully over and done with, in the Bedloes’ eyes, the moment she announced her good news. Now they felt free to stop by her house more often and to invite her and Danny for potluck. Ian had almost reached the point where he could take her for granted. Although still when she turned her silvery gaze upon him he had an arrested feeling, a sense of a skipped beat in the atmosphere of the room.
One of the Bedloe traditions was that important dinners, on holidays and such, were not the usual boring assortment of meats and vegetables. Instead, Bee served their favorite course: hors d’oeuvres. Oh, there’d be a turkey at Thanksgiving, cakes for birthdays, but those were just a nod to convention. What mattered were the stuffed mushrooms, the runny cheeses, the spreads and dips and pâtés and shrimps on toothpicks. The family was secretly proud of this practice; they enjoyed watching guests’ reactions. Nothing humdrum about the Bedloes! That Christmas they had oysters on the half shell, and the look of horror on Lucy’s children’s faces made everybody laugh. “Never mind,” Danny told them. “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to.”
Danny was exuberant these days. He had researched pregnancy and childbirth as if he expected to deliver the baby himself, and he kept a long scroll of possible names scrunched in his pocket. For some strange reason, he seemed very fond of Thomas and Agatha. Well, Thomas was all right, Ian supposed. He looked kind of cute in his dapper little sailor outfit. But Agatha! Really there was only so much you could do with such a child. Her frilly pink dress made her face appear all the more wooden, and her hair stood out at her jaw in a monolithic wedge. Sometimes Ian caught her giving him one of her flat stares, reminding him of that doll that Thomas was so attached to. Dulcimer. Same numb, blank face,