Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [144]
“That’s not really working out,” Daphne told him. “It’s too personal.”
“A travel agency is personal?”
“Mr. X and Mrs. Y book two flights to Paris and one hotel room, say, and I can’t let on I’ve noticed. Or they cheat on their expense accounts with first-class reservations to—”
No one suggested that this new job would surely be even more personal—that she seemed to search out the personal. Finally Curt said, “Well, if you ever get tired of clutter counseling you could always become a scribe.”
“Scribe?” Daphne asked, perking up.
“You could rent a stall at Harborplace and offer to write people’s letters for them.”
Daphne looked perplexed. The only person who laughed was Ian.
There was a little wait before dessert because they had to freeze the ice cream. Bobbeen said, “You realize we don’t have a single child here? No one begging to turn the crank for us.” But the foreigners, it emerged, would love to turn the crank. They rushed off to the kitchen while Daphne and Agatha cleared the table. Rita stayed seated at Ian’s left, debating baby names with Mrs. Jordan. Curt was attempting to break into the fruitcake, and Thomas was telling his grandfather about his latest computer game. The idea was, he said, to show how dislodging one historical event could dislodge a hundred others, even those that seemed unrelated. “Take slavery,” he said. “Students would tell the computer that the U.S. has never had slavery, and then they would name some later event. The computer goes, ‘Beep!’ and a message flashes up on the screen: Null and void.”
“But why would that be any fun?” Doug asked.
“Well, it’s not supposed to be fun so much as educational.”
“I wonder whatever became of Monopoly,” Doug said wistfully.
Rita took Ian’s hand and placed it palm-down on a spot just beneath her left breast. “Feel,” she whispered. A round, blunt knob—a knee or foot or elbow—slid beneath his fingers. It always unnerved him when that happened.
Last week he had signed the papers for Rita’s hospital stay. She’d be in just overnight, if everything went as it should. On the first day he was liable for one dependent and on the second, for two. Two? Then he realized: the baby. One person checks in; two check out. It seemed like sleight of hand. He had never noticed before what a truly astonishing arrangement this was.
“So I took a shortcut through a side street,” Daphne told him, “or really more of an alley, and it was starting to get dark and I heard these footsteps coming up behind me. Pad-pad, pad-pad: gym-shoe footsteps. Rubber soles. I started walking faster. The footsteps walked faster too. I dug my hand in my bag and pulled out that siren you gave me. Remember that key chain with the siren on it you gave me one Christmas?”
They were heading down to the shop together to bring home the cradle. Ian was driving Rita’s pickup, which had a balky gear shift that was annoying him to no end. When the light turned green he had to struggle to get it into first. He said, “Very smart, Daphne. How many times have I warned you not to walk alone at night?”
“I spun around and I pressed the button. The siren went wow! wow! wow! and this person just about fell on top of me—this young, stalky black boy wearing great huge enormous white basketball shoes. He was shocked, you could tell. He backed off and sort of goggled at me. He said, ‘What the hell, man? You know? What the hell?’ And I was standing in front of him with my mouth wide open because I realized I had no idea how to switch the fool thing off. There we were, just looking at each other, and the siren going wow! wow! until bit by bit I started giggling. And then finally he kind of like shook his head and stepped around me. So I threw the siren over a fence and walked on, only making sure not to follow him too closely, and way far behind I could still hear wow, wow, wow …”
“You think it’s all a big joke, don’t you,” Ian said, turning down Chalmer.
“Well, it was, in a way. I mean I wouldn’t have been surprised if that boy had said, ‘Oh, man, that uncle of yours,’ while