Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [79]
The women smiled and nodded and their glasses flashed. (One of them was Jessie Jordan, looking thrilled.) An extremely fat young woman threaded her way through the crowd with a plastic garbage bag, saying, “Plates? Cups? Keep your forks, though. Dessert is on its way.”
What could they serve for dessert if they didn’t believe in sugar? Fruit salad, it turned out, in little foil dishes. Thomas carried one of the trays around. When he came to Doug he said, “Grandpa? Are you having a good time?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Are you making any friends?”
“Certainly,” Doug said, and he felt a sudden wrench for the boy’s thin, anxious face with its dots of old chicken-pox scars. He took a step closer to Mac McClintock, although they’d run out of small talk some minutes ago.
The women were clearing the table now, debating leftovers.
“It seems a shame to throw all this out.”
“Won’t you take it home?”
“No, you.”
“Law, I couldn’t eat it in a month of Sundays.”
“We wouldn’t want to waste it, though.”
Reverend Emmett’s mother said, “Mr. Bedloe, we all think so highly of Brother Ian.”
“Thank you,” Doug said. This was starting to remind him of Parents’ Night at elementary school. He swallowed a chunk of canned pineapple, which surely contained sugar, didn’t it? “And you must be very proud of your son,” he added.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “I look around me and I see so many people, so many redeemed people, and I think, ‘If not for Emmett, what would they be doing?’ ”
What would they be doing? Most would be fine, Doug supposed—his own son among them. Lord, yes. But in all fairness, he supposed this church met a real need for some others. And so he looked around too, following Sister What’s-Her-Name’s eyes. What he saw, though, was not what he had expected. Instead of the festive throng he had been watching a few minutes ago, he saw a spreading circle of stillness that radiated from the table and extended now even to the children, so that a cluster of little girls in one corner allowed their jack ball to die and the boys gave up their violent ride in the glider. Even Bee seemed galvanized, an orange section poised halfway to her parted lips.
“It’s the table,” a woman told Reverend Emmett’s mother.
“The—?”
“Something’s damaged the surface.”
Reverend Emmett’s mother thrust her way through the circle of women, actually shoving one aside. Doug craned to see what they were talking about. The table was bare now and even shinier than before; someone had wiped it with a damp cloth. It looked perfect, at first glance, but then when he tilted his head to let the light slant differently he saw that the shine was marred at one end by several distinct, unshiny rings.
“Oh, no,” Reverend Emmett’s mother breathed.
Everyone started speaking at once: “Try mayonnaise.”
“Try toothpaste.”
“Rub it down with butter.”
“Quiet! Please!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said. She closed her eyes and pressed both hands to her temples.
Reverend Emmett stood near Doug, peering over the others’ heads. (Above the collar of his jaunty polo shirt, his neck looked scrawny and pathetic.) “Perhaps,” he said, “if we attempted to—”
“Shut up and let me think, Emmett!”
Silence.
“Maybe if I came back tomorrow,” she said finally, “with that cunning little man from Marx Antiques, the one who restores old … he could strip it and refinish it. Don’t you suppose? But the owners are due home Tuesday, and if he has to strip the whole … but never mind! I’ll tell him to work round the clock! Or I’ll ask if …”
More silence.
Ian said, “Was it soaped?