Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [49]
“Well, I’m sorry,” Bee said, “but one person or another has been sick the last two weeks running and I just haven’t had a minute. So I’m sorry. Hang something else, instead. Hang grocery bags. Hang pillowcases.”
“Pillowcases!” Thomas said dolefully.
“Don’t worry,” Ian told him. “I’ll do a wash tonight. You go on to bed and I’ll hang your stockings later.”
So that evening was spent in the basement, more or less. Ian found the hampers so overstuffed and moldy that he guessed the laundry had not been seen to in some time, and he decided to take care of the whole lot. Also he put himself in charge of gift wrapping. While his mother sat at the dining room table sipping the sherry he’d poured her, he swaddled everything ineptly in plain tissue. (She had not thought to buy Christmas paper.) He wrapped even the gifts meant for him—a couple of shirts, a ski jacket—pretending to pay them no heed. Periodically he left his work to run downstairs to the basement and start another load of laundry. The scent of detergent and fresh linens gradually filled the house. It wasn’t such a bad Christmas Eve after all.
“Remember Christmas in the old days?” his mother asked. “When we got everything ready so far ahead? Presents sat under the tree for weeks! Homemade, most of them. Lord, you children made enough clay ashtrays to cover every surface, and none of us even smokes. But this year I just couldn’t get up the spirit. Seems like ever since this happened with your brother I’ve been so … unenthusiastic.”
Ian didn’t know what to say to that. He made a big business of tying a bow on a package.
“And remember all the hors d’oeuvres at Christmas dinner?” she asked. “This year I’ll be doing well to throw a piece of meat in the oven.”
“Maybe we should go to a restaurant,” Ian said.
“A restaurant!”
“Why not?”
“Let’s hope we haven’t come to that,” his mother said.
In the living room they heard a sharp grunt—his father, asleep in his recliner chair.
But as it turned out, Christmas Day was not so different that year from any other. Mrs. Jordan came, along with the foreigners. The children contributed their share of excitement (Claudia’s six and Lucy’s three, combined), and Doug’s Polaroid Land camera flashed, and the cat made choking sounds behind the couch. It was disconcerting, in a way. Last Christmas Daphne hadn’t been born yet; nor had Franny. Now here sat Daphne chewing a wad of blue tissue while Franny stirred her fists through Agatha’s jigsaw puzzle. They both seemed so accustomed to being here. And Danny and Lucy had completely vanished. Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.
The day after Christmas, Sid at the movers’ phoned to see if Ian could help out over vacation. Their man Brewster had left them in the lurch, he said. Ian told him he’d be glad to help. School would not reopen till mid-January and he could use the extra cash. So Tuesday morning, he reported to the garage on Greenmount.
LeDon was delighted to see him. That Brewster fellow, he said, had just up and walked away in the middle of a job. “He say, ‘See you round, LeDon.’ I say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t ditching me.’ He say, ‘All day long I’m ditching you,’ and off he go. Well, he weren’t never what you call real friendly.”
They were moving an old lady from a house to an apartment—lots of old-lady belongings, bowlegged furniture and mothballed dresses and more than enough china to stock a good-sized restaurant. Her son, who was overseeing the move, had some