Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [125]
“Well, I guess I must not have traveled with them long enough, then,” Daphne told her.
“How can you say that? With Ian doddering about the house calling you his ‘Daffy-dill’ and spending every Saturday at Good Works—Good Works! Good God. I bet half those people don’t even want a bunch of holy-molies showing up to rake their leaves in front of all their neighbors. And marching off to services come rain or shine; never mind if his niece is here visiting and will have to go to the airport on her own—”
“He gets a lot out of those services,” Daphne said. “And Good Works too; it kind of … links you. He doesn’t have much else, Agatha.”
“Exactly,” Agatha told her. “Isn’t that my point? If not for Second Chance he’d have much more, believe me. That’s what religion does to you. It narrows you and confines you. When I think of how religion ruined our childhood! All those things we couldn’t do, the Sugar Rule and the Caffeine Rule. And that pathetic Bible camp, with poor pitiful Sister Audrey who finally ran off with a soldier if I’m not mistaken. And Brother Simon always telling us how God had saved him for something special when his apartment building burned down, never explaining what God had against those seven others He didn’t save. And the way we had to say grace in every crummy fast-food joint with everybody gawking—”
“It was a silent grace,” Daphne said. “It was the least little possible grace! He always tried to be private about it. And religion never ruined my childhood; it made me feel cared for. Or Thomas’s either. Thomas still attends church himself. Isn’t that so, Thomas? He belongs to a church in New York.”
Thomas said, “It’s getting on toward eleven, you two. Maybe we should be setting out for the airport.”
“Not to change the subject or anything,” Daphne told him.
He pretended he hadn’t heard. They all stood up, and he said, “Then driving back, you and Grandpa can drop me at the train station. I’ll just get my things together. You want me to put my sheets in the hamper, Daph?”
“Are you serious?” Daphne asked. “Those sheets are good for another month yet.”
Agatha rolled her eyes and said, “Charming.”
“You have no right to talk if you’re not here to do the laundry,” Daphne told her.
“Which reminds me,” Agatha said. She stopped short in the dining room, where their grandfather was collecting his cards. “About the linen closet and such—”
“Don’t give it a thought,” Daphne said. “Just go off scot-free to the other side of the continent.”
“No, but I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of cleaning service that could sort this place out for us? Not just clean it but organize it, and I could pay.”
“There’s the Clutter Counselor,” Daphne said.
Stuart laughed. Agatha said, “The what?”
“Rita the Clutter Counselor. She lives with this guy I know, Nick Bascomb. Did you ever meet Nick? And she makes her living sorting other people’s households and putting them in order.”
“Hire her,” Agatha said.
“I don’t know how much she charges, though.”
“Hire her anyway. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”
“What?” their grandfather spoke up suddenly. “You’d let an outsider go through our closets?”
“It’s either that or marry Ian off quick to that Clara person,” Agatha told him.
“I’ll call Rita this evening,” Daphne said.
Rita diCarlo was close to six feet tall—a rangy, sauntering woman in her late twenties with long black hair so frizzy that the braid hanging down her back seemed not so much plaited as clotted. She’d been living with Nick Bascomb for a couple of years now, but Daphne hadn’t really got to know her till just last summer when a bunch of them