Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [130]
“Hello, Daphne,” someone said.
She turned and found Rita diCarlo settling on the stool next to her, unbuttoning her lumber jacket as she hailed the bartender. “Pabst,” she told him. She unwound a wool scarf from her neck and flung her hair back. “You waiting for someone?”
Daphne shook her head.
“Me neither,” Rita said.
Daphne could have guessed as much from Rita’s shapeless black T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans. Her hair was even scruffier than usual; actual dust balls trailed from the end of her braid.
“I had my least favorite kind of job today,” Rita told her. “A divorce. Splitting up a household. Naturally the wife and husband had to be there, so they could offer their opinions.” She accepted her beer and blew into the foam. “And they did have opinions, believe me.”
“Too many jobs get too personal,” Daphne said gloomily.
“Right,” Rita said. She was digging through her pockets for something—a Kleenex. She blew her nose with a honking sound.
“Like this florist’s I was just fired from,” Daphne said. “Everybody’s private messages: you have to write them down pretending not to know English. Or when I worked at Camera Carousel—those photos of girls in bikinis and people’s awful prom nights. You hand over the envelope with this smile like you never even noticed.”
“Look,” Rita said. “Did Ian tell you he and I have been seeing each other?”
“You have?” Daphne asked.
“Well, a couple of times. Well, really just once. I guess you wouldn’t count when I accidentally on purpose ran into him at the wood shop.”
No, Daphne wouldn’t count that.
“I went to Brant’s Custom Woodworks and ordered myself a bureau,” Rita told her.
“I don’t believe he mentioned it.”
“Do you have any idea how much those things cost?”
“Expensive, huh?” Daphne said.
She glanced again at her résumé. Page two: Previous Employment. Here the facts were not padded but streamlined, for the man had suggested that too long a list made a person look flighty. “What say we strike the framer’s,” he had said, his sneer growing more pronounced.
“Another example is picture framing,” Daphne told Rita. “People bring in these poor little paintings they’ve done themselves, or their drawings with the mouths erased and redrawn a dozen times and the hands posed out of sight because they can’t do hands, and all you say is, ‘Let me see now, perhaps a double mat …’ ”
“Then after we talked about my bureau awhile I asked if he’d come look at my apartment,” Rita said, “just so he’d have an idea of the scale.”
Daphne pulled her eyes away from the résumé. She focused on Rita’s face for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you live with Nick Bascomb?”
“Well, I did, but I made him move out,” Rita said.
“Oh? When was this?”
“Wednesday,” Rita said.
“Wednesday? You mean this Wednesday just past?”
“See,” Rita said, “Monday I went to visit Ian at the wood shop, and that night I asked Nick to move out. But I let him stay till Wednesday because he needed time to get his things together.”
“Decent of you,” Daphne said dryly.
“So then Friday Ian came by and we settled on what size bureau I wanted. I invited him to supper, but he said you-all were expecting him at home.”
Daphne tried to remember back to Friday. Had she been there, even? She might have gone out with her usual gang and forgotten supper altogether.
“So when was it you saw him the second time?” she asked Rita.
“Well, that was it. Friday.”
“You mean the second time was when he came to measure for your bureau?”
“Well, yes.”
Daphne sat back on her stool.
This Rita was so big, though. She had that angular, big-boned frame. You’d expect her to be immune.
“Um, Rita,” she said. “Ian’s kind of … hard to pin down, sometimes. Also, I believe he has this sort of girlfriend at his church.”
“So what? I had a boyfriend, till last Wednesday,” Rita said.
“Yes, but then besides he’s very, let’s say Christian. Did you know that?”
“What do you think I am, Buddhist?”
“He’s unusually Christian, though.