Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [22]
“I did not. I made it better.”
“You’re bearing down too hard, too. Look at what you did to your crayon.”
He looked. Earlier he’d peeled the paper off and now the crayon curved sideways in the heat from his hand, like their mother’s poor bent candles in the napkin drawer.
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Your last purple crayon!”
“I didn’t like it anyhow,” he said, “and this coloring book is stupid. Who gave me this stupid coloring book?”
“Danny gave it to you,” Agatha said.
He clapped a hand over his mouth.
Danny hadn’t given him the coloring book; it was Grandma Bedloe. She’d picked it up at the Pantry Pride one day when she went to buy their mother some food. But Thomas always worried that Danny was listening to them up in heaven, so Agatha said, “He bought it as a special, special present, and he hoped very much you would like it.”
Thomas removed his hand and said loudly, “I do like it.”
“Then why’d you mess all over it?”
“I made a mistake.”
Daphne said, “Oho! Oho!”—not laughing, as you might imagine, but starting to complain. The next step would be real wailing, all sad and lost and lonely. Thomas and Agatha hated that. Thomas said, “Go tell Mama.”
“You go.”
“You’re the oldest.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Last time I went, she cried,” Thomas said.
“She was having a difficult day.”
“Maybe this day is difficult too.”
“If you go,” Agatha said, “I’ll give you my patent leather purse.”
“I don’t use a purse.”
“My plastic camera?”
“Your camera’s broken.”
Daphne had reached the wailing stage. Agatha started feeling desperate. She said, “We could stand next to the crib, maybe. Just talk and smile and stuff.”
“Okay.”
They got up and went down the hall, past the closed door of their mother’s room and into the children’s room. It smelled of dirty diapers. Daphne was sitting in that superstraight way she had with her fingers wrapped around the crib bars, and when they came in she grew quiet and pressed her face to the bars so her little nose stuck out. She had been crying so hard that her upper lip was glassed over. She blinked and stared at them and then gave a big sloppy grin.
“Now, what is this nonsense I’m hearing?” Agatha said sternly.
She was trying to sound like Grandma Bedloe. Grownups had these voices they saved just for babies. If she’d wanted, she could have put on her mother’s voice. “Sweetheart!” Or Danny’s. “How’s my princess?” he would ask. Used to ask. In the olden days asked.
Best to stick with Grandma Bedloe. “Who’s this making such a hullabaloo?”
Daphne grinned wider, with her four new crinkle-edged teeth shining forth and her lashes all wet and sticking to her cheeks. She wore just a little undershirt, and her diaper was a brownish color—what their uncle Ian would call Not a Pretty Sight.
“Give her her pacifier,” Thomas suggested.
“She gets mad if you give her a pacifier when she wants a bottle.”
“Maybe she’s not hungry yet.”
“After her nap, she’s always hungry.”
Daphne looked back and forth between the two of them. It seemed to be dawning on her that they weren’t going to be much help.
“Just try her pacifier,” Thomas said.
“Well, where’d it go?”
They reached in between the bars and patted the sheet, hunting. Some places the sheet was damp, but that might have been the heat, or tears. The smell was terrible.
“Found it!” Thomas crowed. He poked the pacifier between Daphne’s lips, but she spat it out again. Her chin began quivering and her eyebrows turned bright pink.
“Phooey,” Thomas said. He picked up the pacifier and jammed it in his own mouth, and then he backed off till he was sitting on the edge of his bed with his arms folded tight across his chest.
“Maybe we could feed her in her crib,” Agatha said.
Thomas made noisy sucking sounds.
Agatha went to the kitchen and dragged a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator. She set the jug on the table and took a cloudy nursing bottle from the jumble of unwashed dishes next to the sink.
Daphne