Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [102]
“So get to the end,” Agatha told her. “Did you do like we planned about dinner?”
“I did exactly like we planned. When Ian got up to go he said, ‘Well, I really do thank you, Miss Pennington—’ ”
“Not ‘Ariana’?”
“ ‘Miss Pennington,’ he said, and I said, ‘Me too, thanks; and Ian, can’t we ask her to dinner sometime?’ ”
“That did it,” Thomas said. “No way to back out of that.”
“Well, he tried. He said, ‘Oh, Daph, Miss Pennington has a very busy schedule,’ but she said, ‘Please, it’s Ariana. And I’d love to come.’ ”
“Goody,” Agatha said.
“Except … Ian is so backward.”
“Backward?”
“He said, ‘To tell the truth, our family’s not much for entertaining.’ ”
The other two groaned.
“But Miss Pennington told him, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t expect a banquet!’ and then she laughed and put her hand on his arm again.”
“She’s nuts about him,” Thomas said.
“Except Ian moved his arm away. In fact every time she did it he moved his arm away.”
“He’s playing hard to get.”
That made Daphne and Agatha look more cheerful. Thomas was the social one, after all. He was almost frantically social; he could skate so deftly through any situation. He was the one who knew how the world worked.
On the night Miss Pennington came to dinner, their grandma fixed roast beef. (The Bedloes confined themselves now to foods that didn’t require much preparation: roasts and baked chicken and burgers.) She had trouble holding utensils, and so she let Agatha make the gravy. “Pour in a dab of water,” she instructed, “and now a dab more …”
Thomas was setting the table, arranging the good silver on the place mats their grandma had already spread around. He came to the kitchen with a fistful of forks and said, “How come you’ve got nine place mats out?”
“Why, how many should we have?” their grandma asked.
“It’s only us and Miss Pennington: seven.”
“And also Mr. Kitt and the woman from your church,” their grandma said. “That comes to nine.”
Mr. Kitt needed no explanation; he was the authentic, certified vagrant who’d been more or less adopted by Second Chance last winter. But the woman? “What woman?” Thomas asked.
“Why, I don’t know,” their grandma said. “Some new member or visitor or something, I guess. You’ll have to ask Ian.”
The three of them looked at each other, “Rats,” Daphne said.
“I’m sure we’ll like her,” their grandma told them. “Ian said as long as we were going to all this trouble, we might as well invite her. And we’ve never had Mr. Kitt once; Ian says you’re the only people in church who haven’t.”
“Yes, but … rats,” Daphne said. “This was supposed to be just Miss Pennington!”
“Oh, don’t worry, we won’t neglect your precious teacher,” their grandma said merrily.
Last week they’d heard a new neighbor ask their grandma how many children she had. They’d listened for her answer: would she say two, or three? What did you say when a son had died? But she fooled them; she said, “Only one that’s still at home.” As if the people who stuck by you were all that counted, as if anybody not present didn’t exist.
She probably thought it was fine for Ian to grow old all alone with his parents.
The first to arrive was Mr. Kitt. Mr. Kitt wasn’t really a vagrant anymore. He had a job sweeping floors at Brother Simon’s place of business and he lived rent-free above Sister Nell’s garage. But people at church still traded him proudly back and forth for meals, and he continued to look the part as if he felt it was expected of him. Gray whiskers a quarter-inch long shadowed his pale face, and his clothes always sagged, oddly empty, even when they were the expensive tailored suits handed down from Sister Nell’s father-in-law. On his feet he wore red sneakers, the stubby kind that toddlers wear. These made him walk very quietly, so when he followed Daphne into the living room he seemed awed and hesitant. “Oh, my,” he said, peering around, “what a family, family type of house.”
“Ian’s not home from work yet,” Daphne told him. The three children had been asked to make conversation while their