Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [44]
From the stairs came the sound of footsteps and his mother’s voice saying, “… juice in that round glass pitcher and—” She arrived in the doorway with the baby propped on her hip. Thomas and Agatha were shadowing her. “Oh! Mrs. Myrdal,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Mrs. Myrdal rose and reached out in that fumble-fingered, greedy manner that old ladies take on around babies. “Would you look at how this child has grown!” she said. “Remember Mrs. Moo-doe, darlin’?” She accepted Daphne in a rumpled bunch and cocked her head at the other two. “Thomas and Agatha, I’d never have known you!”
“Now, we shouldn’t be long,” Bee told her. “It’s going to be a very simple … Ian, where’s your father got to?”
Ian said, “Um …”
“Isn’t this just like him! Check the basement, will you? Mrs. Myrdal, the tea bags are in the …”
Ian went out to the kitchen. He thought, She was only shoplifting. He crossed the pantry and started down the basement steps. She wasn’t meeting some man, she was shoplifting. He called, “Dad?”
“Down here.”
That dress was not a present from her lover after all.
His father was tinkering at his workbench. Wearing his good dark suit, his hair still showing the comb lines, he bent over the lamp from the attic bedroom. “Are we set to go?” he asked without turning.
Why, even I have been known to shoplift. Me and Pig and Andrew, back in fifth grade. It’s nothing. Or next to nothing.
“Ian?”
He looked at his father.
“Are we set to go?”
“Yes,” Ian said after a moment.
“Well, then.”
His father switched off the light above the bench. He started toward the stairs. He halted next to Ian and said, “Coming?”
“Yes.”
They climbed the stairs.
Oh, God, this is the one last little dark dot I can’t possibly absorb.
In the hall, his mother was putting on her hat. “Why is it,” she asked his father, “that the minute everyone’s ready, you choose to disappear?”
“I was just looking at that lamp, sweetheart.”
The three of them left the house and walked to the car. Ian felt bruised all down the front of his body, as if he’d been kicked.
The last time he’d been in this church was for Danny’s funeral—and before that, for Danny’s wedding. When he stood on the sidewalk looking up at Dober Street Presbyterian, all his thoughts were gathered toward his brother. He could almost believe that Danny had been left behind here, in this peaked stone building with the louvered steeple.
Inside, his parents stopped to greet Mrs. Jordan while Ian continued down the aisle. He passed Aunt Bev and her husband, and Cousin Amy, and a couple of the foreigners from the neighborhood. He caught sight of Cicely’s blond curls gleaming like fresh pine shavings, and he slid in next to her and took hold of her hand, which turned out to contain a knob of damp Kleenex. Her lashes and her cheeks were damp too, he saw when she smiled at him. She had told him when he telephoned that she wouldn’t think of not coming to this, even though it meant a two-hour train ride. She just needed to say goodbye, she told him. She had always thought Lucy was special.
The organ started playing softly, and Dr. Prescott entered through a side door and took a seat behind the pulpit. Below the pulpit lay the casket, pearly gray, decorated with a spray of white flowers. The sight of it made Ian feel cold. Something like a cold blade entered his chest and he looked away.
Now the others were filing down the aisle—his father solemn and sheepish, his mother wearing an expression that seemed less grief-stricken than disappointed. “I’m not angry; just disappointed,” she used to tell Ian when he misbehaved. (What would she say now, if she knew what he had done?) Behind came Claudia and Macy with Abbie, who was evidently considered old enough now for funerals. She had on her first high heels and wobbled slightly as she followed the others into a pew. This wasn’t the front pew but the one just behind. Maybe the front pew was reserved for Lucy’s blood relations, if any showed up.
But none did. The organ music dwindled away, Dr. Prescott rose and announced a prayer, and still no