Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [34]
“Hello?” their mother said into the receiver.
Her forehead was suddenly creased.
“Hello, is this … who is this?”
She listened. She said, “You mean the, um, the wife Mrs. Rumford?”
Then she said, “Sorry.” And hung up.
Thomas said, “Agatha kicked me, Mama.”
Their mother closed the cookbook and stared down at it. She stroked the cover, the golden letters stamped into the cloth.
“Mama?”
“We’d better go to bed,” Agatha told Thomas.
“You’re not the boss of me!”
“It’s time, Thomas,” she said, and she made her voice very hard.
He slid off his chair and followed her out of the kitchen.
In the children’s room, Daphne was asleep. They undressed in the dark, using the light from the hallway. Thomas wanted his cowboy pajamas but Agatha couldn’t find them. She said he’d have to wear his airplane pajamas instead. He climbed into them without an argument, staggering around the room as he tried to fit his feet through. Then he said he had to pee. “Use Mama’s bathroom,” Agatha told him.
“What for?”
“Just do.”
She’d kept him away from the other one all evening. She worried the toilet would flood again.
She lay down in bed and pulled the covers up and listened to her mother moving around the house. Every sound meant something: the TV clicking on and then off, a drawer in the living room opening and then closing, the clang of a metal ashtray on the coffee table. Their mother smoked only when she was upset, holding the cigarette in some wrong-looking way with her fingers sticking out too straight. Agatha heard the scrape of a match, the pushed, tired sound of her breath whooshing forth.
Where were the pills? The popping of the lid off the pill bottle?
At least when she took pills she didn’t fidget around like this.
Thomas appeared in the doorway—a black-and-gray shape against the yellow light. He crossed not to his own bed but to Agatha’s. She had more or less expected that. She grumbled but she slid over to make room. His hair smelled like sugar browning in a saucepan. He said, “She didn’t come kiss us good night.”
“Later she’ll come.”
“I want her to come now.”
“Later,” Agatha said.
“She didn’t read us a story, either.”
“I’ll tell you one.”
“Reading’s better.”
“Well, Thomas! I can’t read in the dark, can I?”
Sometimes she noticed how much she sounded like her mother. Same sure tone, same exasperated answers. Although she failed to resemble her in any other way. At a family dinner last winter Grandma Bedloe had said, “What a pity Agatha didn’t inherit Lucy’s bone structure.”
“Once upon a time,” she told Thomas, “there was a poor servant girl named Cinderella.”
“Not that one.”
“Once upon a time a rich merchant had three daughters.”
“Not that one either. I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”
This was no surprise to Agatha. (He liked things that rhymed. Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, who is nibbling at my house?) But Agatha hated “Hansel and Gretel.” There wasn’t any magic to it—no fairy godmothers, or frogs turning into princes. “How about ‘Snow White’?” she asked. “That’s got Mirror, mirror, on the wall …”
“I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”
She sighed and resettled her pillow. “All right, have it your way,” she said. “Once upon a time Hansel and Gretel were taking a walk—”
“That’s not how it starts!”
“Who’s telling this: you or me?”
“First there’s their parents! And dropping breadcrumbs on the path! And the birds eat all the crumbs and Hansel and Gretel get lost!”
“Keep your voice down!” Agatha hissed.
Daphne slept on, though. And in the living room their mother’s footsteps continued. Pace, pace. Swish of kimono. Pace, pace.
The night after Danny’s funeral, she had paced till morning. (Back then she didn’t have