Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [128]
She took a mug from the cupboard, where everything sat in straight rows—eight mugs, eight short glasses, eight tall glasses. The mugs that didn’t match and the odd-sized glasses had been sent to Good Works. The cereals that people had tried once and never again had disappeared from the shelves. In just three days Rita had turned this house into a sort of sample kit: one perfect set of everything. But Daphne hadn’t quite adjusted yet and she felt a little rustle of panic. She wanted some extras. She wanted that crowd of cracked, crazed, chipped, handleless mugs waiting behind the other mugs on the off chance they might be needed.
She ladled coffee into the drip pot and then poured in the boiling water. Coffee was her weakness. Reverend Emmett said coffee clouded the senses, coffee stepped between God and the self; but Daphne had discovered long ago that coffee sharpened the senses, and she loved to sit through church all elated and jangly-nerved and keyed to the sound of that inner voice saying enigmatic things she might someday figure out when she was wiser: if not for you, if not for you, if not for you and down in the meadow where the green grass grows … She waited daily for caffeine to be declared illegal, but it seemed the government had not caught on yet.
She poured the coffee and sat down at the table with it, warming her hands around the mug. Now her grandfather’s footsteps climbed the basement stairs and crossed the pantry. Daphne looked up, but the figure in the doorway was not her grandfather after all. It was Rita. Daphne said, “Rita! Aren’t you done with us?”
Well, she was done. She had finished yesterday afternoon and even presented her staggeringly high bill, which Daphne was going to mail on to Agatha as soon as she figured out where the stamps had been moved to. But here Rita stood, flushed from her climb, looking a bit better put together than usual in a flowing white shirt that bloused above her jeans and a tan suede jacket as soft as washed silk. “Daphne,” she said flatly. “I thought you were Ian.”
Ah.
Daphne had been through this any number of times. Back in high school, girlfriends of hers showed up unannounced, wearing brand new outfits and carrying their bosoms ostentatiously far in front of them like fruit on a tray. “Oh,” they’d say in just such a tone, dull and disappointed. “I thought you were Ian.”
But Rita already had somebody, didn’t she? She was living with Nick Bascomb. Wasn’t she?
“It just occurred to me,” Rita said, “that I ought to try once more to sort out your grandpa’s workbench. Not that I’d charge any extra, of course. But I didn’t feel right allowing it to stay so …”
Her voice dwindled away. Daphne, sitting back in her chair and cupping her mug in both hands, watched her with some enjoyment. Rita diCarlo, of all people! Such a tough cookie. Although Daphne could have warned her that she was about as far from Ian’s type as a woman could get.
“But it seems your grandpa’s sticking to his guns,” Rita said finally.
“Yes,” Daphne said. She took a sip from her mug.
“So I’ll be going, I guess.”
“Okay.”
In another mood, she might at least have offered coffee. But she had troubles of her own right now, and so she let Rita see herself out.
Daphne started reading the want ads over breakfast every morning. A waste of time. “What is this?” she asked her grandfather. “A city where nobody needs anything?”
“Maybe you should try an agency,” he said.
When it came to unemployment, he was her best listener. Ian always said, “Oh, something will show up,” but her grandfather had been