Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [18]
She hung up, perhaps still talking. Ian sat down on the rug and settled Daphne on his knee.
It was true he liked all games, but Thomas and Agatha were not very challenging opponents. They employed a strategy of avoidance, fearfully clinging to the safety squares and deliberating whole minutes before venturing into open territory. Also, Thomas couldn’t add. Each toss of the dice remained two separate numbers, laboriously counted out one by one. “A two and a four. One, two. One, two, three—”
“Six,” Ian said impatiently. He scooped up the dice and flung them so they skittered across the board. “Eight,” he said. “Ha!” Eight was what he needed to capture Agatha’s man.
“No fair,” she told him. “One douse went on the carpet.”
“Die,” he said.
Her jaw dropped.
“One die went on the carpet,” he said. He picked up his own man.
“No fair if they don’t land on the board!” she said. “You have to take your turn over.”
“I should worry, I should care, only babies cry no fair,” Ian singsonged. He pounded his man down the board triumphantly. “Five, six, seven—”
The phone rang.
“—eight,” he said, nudging aside Agatha’s man. He hoisted Daphne to his shoulder and reached up for the phone on the plastic cube table. “Hello?”
“Ian?”
“Hi, Cicely.”
“On your way over, could you pick up some butter? My white sauce didn’t thicken and I had to throw it out and start again, and now I don’t have enough butter for the rolls.”
“Sure thing,” Ian said. “So how’s our friend Stevie?”
“Stevie?”
“Is he getting ready for bed yet?”
“Not now, it’s a quarter past seven.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Oops!” she said.
She hung up.
Ian hoped she wasn’t losing sight of the important issues here. White sauce, rolls, what did he care? He just wanted to get that brother of hers out of the picture.
Daphne breathed damply into his left ear. He boosted her higher on his shoulder and turned back to the game.
They finished Parcheesi and started Old Maid. Old Maid was sort of pointless, though, because Thomas couldn’t bluff. He had that sallow kind of skin that reveals every emotion; whenever he grew anxious, bruiselike shadows deepened beneath his eyes.
The game went on forever and Daphne started fussing. “She wants her bottle,” Agatha said, not lifting her gaze from her cards. Ian went out to the kitchen to take her bottle from the refrigerator, and while he waited for it to warm he jounced Daphne up and down. It didn’t do any good, though; he seemed to have lost his charm. All she did was fuss harder and climb higher on his shoulder, working her nosy, sharp little toes irritatingly between his ribs.
When he returned to the living room, the other two had abandoned the card game and were watching TV. He sat between them on the couch and fed Daphne while a barefoot woman sang a folk song about hammering in railroad ties. Thomas sucked his thumb. Agatha wound a strand of hair around her index finger. Daphne fell asleep halfway through her bottle and Ian rose cautiously and carried her to her crib.
At 8:15, he started getting angry. How was he supposed to make it to Cicely’s by 8:30? Also he had to stop off at home beforehand—change clothes, filch some wine from the pantry. Damn, he should have seen to all that before he came here. He jiggled a foot across his knee and watched a housewife in high heels explaining that bacteria cause odors.
At 8:35, the phone rang. He sprang for it, already preparing his response. (No, you can’t stay out longer.) “Ian?” Cicely asked. “When you come, could you bring some gravy mix?”
“Gravy mix.”
“I just can’t understand where I went wrong.”
Ian said, “Did Stevie get to bed all right?”
“I’m going to see to that in a minute, but first this gravy! I pick up the spoon and everything in the pan comes with it, all in a clump.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Ian told her. “I’ll bring the mix. Meanwhile, you get Stevie into bed.”
“Well …” Cicely said, trailing off.
“Dad’s old rocker dull and gray?” two girls sang on TV. “Stain it, wax it, the Wood-Witch way!”
After he’d hung up, Ian turned to the children