Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [25]
She stood up and collected Daphne and staggered over to the crib with her and plopped her down. She wrestled Daphne’s diaper around her, being very, very careful with the safety pins, and then she raised the railing and locked it. “Stay there,” she told Daphne. “Put on a different shirt,” she told Thomas.
“What shirt?”
“I don’t care. Just different.”
He laid Dulcimer aside, grumbling, and slid off his bed. While he was rummaging in bureau drawers, Agatha returned to the bathroom and stirred a towel through the puddle around the toilet. Then she hid the towel in the hamper. She went out to the kitchen and put the milk back into the fridge. “Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chewing gum,” Thomas sang, while Agatha spread his coloring book on the windowsill to dry. One by one she plucked his crayons from the pool of milk on the table. They were beginning to dye the milk all different shades, lavender and pink and blue. She dumped them into the waste can under the sink.
“What are you doing!” Thomas asked, coming up behind her. He was wearing a green shirt now that clashed with his blue shorts, and it was buttoned wrong besides.
“Button your buttons over from scratch,” Agatha told him. She unfolded a cloth and started wiping off the table.
“What did you do with my crayons?”
“They were all wet and runny.”
“You can’t just throw them away!”
He started rooting through the waste can. Agatha said, “Stop that! I just got everything nice again!”
“You better give me back my crayons, Agatha.”
Their mother said, “Is it still daytime?”
She was standing in the doorway in her slip. Her pillow had made a mark across one cheek and she didn’t have any makeup on. “I thought it was night,” she said. “Is that Daphne I hear?”
“Make Agatha give me back my crayons, Mama!”
But their mother was drifting down the hall, heading toward Daphne’s “Oho! Oho!”
“Stealer!” Thomas hissed at Agatha. “Crayon stealer!”
She put the wet cloth in the sink. “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” she said, “but names will never—”
“You can go to jail for stealing!”
“Is this my little Daphne?” their mother said, back again with Daphne in her arms. “Is this my sweetheart?”
She sat in a kitchen chair and settled Daphne on her lap. Daphne’s diaper was dry but it was so loose it pouched in front of her stomach. The table was clean but it was damp where Agatha had wiped it. Everything looked fine but just barely, like a room where you walk in and get the feeling something was rustling and whispering till half a second ago. But their mother didn’t seem to notice. She stared down at Daphne with her face bare-naked and erased and pale. “Is this my Daphne?” she kept saying, “Is this my baby Daphne?” so it began to sound as if she really did wonder. “Is this her?” she asked. “Is it her? Is it?” And she looked up at Thomas and Agatha and waited for them to answer.
When the hottest part of the day was over, they got ready for their walk to the typewriter store. This was something they’d started doing just in the past few weeks, but already there was a pattern to it. Agatha liked patterns. So did Thomas. Together they hauled Daphne’s stroller out of the coat closet and unfolded it. Daphne watched from the rug, flapping her arms up and down when she heard the wheels squeak. Maybe she liked patterns, too.
They went to see if their mother was ready, but she was shut up in her bathroom. When she came out, she wore her white blouse that wrapped and tied at the side and her watery flowing India skirt. She blotted her lipstick on a tissue and asked, “How do I look?”
“You look nice,” they both told her.
From the living room, Daphne made a fussy sound. Their mother sighed and picked up her bag. “Let’s go,” she said.
The air outdoors felt heavy and warm, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down so hard anymore. Their mother walked in front, wheeling Daphne in her stroller, and Thomas and