Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [124]
“I dreamed I was going blind,” Thomas said. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, how awful, we’re so sorry for you.’ I said, ‘Sorry? Why? I’ve had twenty-six years of perfect vision!’ I really meant it, too. I sounded like one of those inspirational stories we used to read in Bible camp.”
“I dreamed I was seeing patients,” Stuart said. “They all had some kind of rash and I was trying to remember my dermatology. It didn’t seem to occur to me to tell them that wasn’t my field.”
Agatha said, “I’d never go into dermatology.”
They were having English muffins and juice—just the four of them, because it was ten-thirty and Doug and Ian had eaten breakfast hours ago. Doug was in the dining room laying out a game of solitaire, the soft flip-flip of his cards providing a kind of background rhythm. Ian was moving around the kitchen wiping off counters. When he passed near Daphne he smiled down at her and said, “What did you dream, Daphne?” Something about his crinkled eyes and the kindly attentiveness of his expression made her sad, but she smiled back and said, “Oh, nothing.”
“Dermatology’s not bad,” Stuart was saying. “At least dermatologists don’t have night call.”
“But it’s so superficial,” Agatha said.
“You should see Agatha with her patients,” Stuart told the others. “She’s amazing. She’ll say straight out to them, ‘What you have can’t be cured.’ I think they feel relieved to finally hear the truth.”
“I say, ‘What you have can’t be cured at this particular time,” Agatha corrected him. “There’s a difference.”
Daphne couldn’t imagine that either version would be as much of a relief as Stuart supposed.
“Speaking of time,” Ian said, draping his dishcloth over the faucet, “when exactly does your plane take off, Ag?”
“Somewhere around noon, I think. Why?”
“Well, I’m wondering about church. If I wanted to go to church I’d have to leave right now.”
“Go, then,” she told him.
“But if your flight’s at noon—”
“Go! Grandpa can drive us.”
Ian hesitated. Daphne knew what he was thinking. He was weighing Sunday services, which he never missed if he could help it, against the possibility of hurting Agatha’s feelings. And Agatha, with her chin raised defiantly and her glasses flashing an opaque white light, would most definitely have hurt feelings. Daphne knew that if Ian did not. Finally Ian said, “Well, if you’re sure …” and Agatha snapped, “Absolutely! Go.”
He didn’t seem to catch her tone. (Or he didn’t want to catch it.) He rounded the table to kiss her goodbye. “It’s been wonderful having you,” he said. She looked away from him. He shook Stuart’s hand. “Stuart, I hope you two will come again at Christmas.”
“We’ll try,” Stuart told him, rising. “Thanks for the hospitality.”
“You planning on church today, Daphne?”
“I thought I’d ride along to the airport,” Daphne said.
“Well, I’ll be off, then,”
In the dining room, they heard him speaking to Doug. “Guess I’ll let you do the airport run, Dad.”
“Oh, well,” Doug said. “Seems I’m losing here anyway.”
“And another thing,” Agatha told Daphne. (But what was the first thing? Daphne wondered.) “This business about you not driving is really dumb, Daph.”
“Driving?” Daphne asked.
“Here you are, twenty-two years old, and Grandpa has to drive us to the airport. As far as I know you’ve never even sat behind a steering wheel.”
“How did my driving get into this?”
“It’s a symptom of a whole lot of other problems, any fool can see that. Why are you still depending on people to chauffeur you around? Why have you never gone away to college? Why are you still living at home when everyone else has long since left?”
“Maybe I like living at home, so what’s the big deal?” Daphne asked. “This happens to be a perfectly nice place.”
“Nobody says it isn’t,” Agatha said, “but that’s not the issue. You’ve simply reached the stage where you should be on your own. Right, Stuart? Right, Thomas?”
Stuart developed an interest in brushing crumbs off his sweater. Thomas gave one of his shrugs and