Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [5]
“That’s true, we have,” his father said.
“And now that the draft’s stepping up …”
“Oh, yes, the draft,” his father said faintly.
“Did she mention how many children she had?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“If she has lots,” Bee told him, “we can mix them in with Claudia’s and form our own baseball team.”
She laughed. Ian turned to look at her, but he was too late. Already she had passed smoothly over to unquestioning delight, and he had missed his chance to see how she did it.
Lucy did not have lots of children after all; just two. A girl aged six and a boy aged three. She lived a couple of miles away, Danny said, in a rented apartment above a Hampden pharmacy; and she left the children with the pharmacist’s wife when she went to work every day. He told Ian this later that night, when he stopped by Ian’s room on his way to bed. He said she worked as a waitress at the Fill ’Er Up Café—the only job she could find that allowed her to arrange her hours around her children’s. But he would soon put an end to that, Danny said. No working wife for Danny.
He said she had mailed that package at the request of her ex-husband. Her ex-husband was getting remarried and he wanted her to send him his things. Lucy had packed up every trace of him: the geisha girl figurine he’d won tossing darts at the fair, for instance, and the bowling ball in the red-and-white canvas bag that matched her own. Danny listed these objects in a detailed and lingering way, as if even they had fallen within the circle of his love. The bowling ball, he said, had accounted for much of the package’s weight (a total of twenty-eight pounds). Lucy had also mentioned a trophy cup, which couldn’t have been so very light either.
Ian tried to imagine Lucy bowling. Illogically, he pictured her in the shoes she had worn to the house—little red pumps with red cloth roses at the toes. The high heels would make tiny dimples in the glossy wood of the runway.
“She’s a wonderful cook,” Danny said. “Whenever I come to dinner she fixes a special meal for me and she lights new candles. Lucy feels people should always eat by candlelight. And sometimes she makes her own holders; last night it was two red apples. Wasn’t that smart? She has the smartest ideas. She’s good with napkins, too; she folds them into these different shapes, accordions or butterflies or wigwams, because Lucy says …”
Lucy says, Lucy feels, Lucy believes. She seemed almost present in the room with them. Danny lounged in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, his eyes slanting slightly the way they did when something fired him up. The knot of his tie hung loose on his chest, which made him look tipsy even though he wasn’t.
How did their evenings end? Ian wanted to ask. Did the two of them make out on her couch? Or maybe even go all the way?
Danny spoke of Lucy’s knack for interior decorating, her concern for her children, her difficult past life. “Both her parents died in a car crash when she was still in her teens,” he said, “and that husband of hers must not have been much, considering how far he’s fallen behind on the child support. Not that she complains. She never says a word against anyone; that’s not her style. I tell you, Ian, I’ve been looking for a woman like Lucy all my life, but I’d started to think I’d never find her. I almost thought there was something wrong with me. I’d meet these girls who seemed so pretty and so nice and then it would turn out I’d been hoodwinked; they were flirts or users or constitutional liars and everyone knew it but me. Shouldn’t there be some sort of training course in