Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [80]
Everyone turned and looked for him. It took a minute to find him; he was standing at the far end of the room.
“Seems to me the finish is some kind of polyurethane,” he said, “and if those rings are grease, well, a little soap wouldn’t do any harm and it might even—”
“Soap! Yes!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said.
She went herself to the kitchen. While she was gone, the fat young woman told Doug, “Brother Ian works with wood every day, you know.”
“Yes, I’m his father,” Doug said.
She said, “Are you really!”
Reverend Emmett’s mother came back. She held a sponge and a bottle of liquid detergent. They parted to let her through and she approached the table and bent over it. Doug was too far away to see what she did next, but he heard the sighs of relief. “Now dry it off,” someone suggested.
A woman whipped a paisley scarf from her neck and offered that, and it was accepted.
“Perfect,” someone said.
This time when he craned, Doug saw that the rings had vanished.
Right away the congregation started packing, collecting coats and baskets. Maybe they would have anyhow, but Doug thought he detected a sort of letdown in the general mood. People filed out meekly, not glancing back at the house as they left it. (Doug imagined the house thinking, Goodness, what was all THAT about?) They crossed the columned front porch with their heads lowered. Doug helped Bee into the car. “Coming?” he asked Mrs. Jordan.
“Oh, I’m going to ride in the bus,” she said. She alone seemed undampened. “Wasn’t Ian the hero, though!”
“Sure thing,” Doug said.
He watched her set off toward the bus with one hand clamping down her cartwheel hat.
Driving home, he made no attempt to stay with the others. He left the bus behind on the Beltway and breezed eastward at a speed well above the legal limit. “So now we’ve been to a Christian Fellowship Picnic,” he told Bee.
“Yes,” she said.
“I wonder if it’ll become a yearly event.”
“Probably,” she said.
Then she started talking about Danny. How did she get from the picnic to Danny? No telling. She started kneading the knuckles of her right hand, the hand that looked more swollen, and she said, “Sometimes I have the strangest feeling. I give this start and I think, ‘Why!’ I think, ‘Why, here we are! Just going about our business the same as usual!’ And yet so much has changed. Danny is gone, our golden boy, our first baby boy that we were so proud of, and our house is stuffed with someone else’s children. You know they all are someone else’s. You know that! And Ian is a whole different person and Claudia’s so bustling now and our lives have turned so makeshift and second-class, so second-string, so second-fiddle, and everything’s been lost. Isn’t it amazing that we keep on going? That we keep on shopping for clothes and getting hungry and laughing at jokes on TV? When our oldest son is dead and gone and we’ll never see him again and our life’s in ruins!”
“Now, sweetie,” he said.
“We’ve had such extraordinary troubles,” she said, “and somehow they’ve turned us ordinary. That’s what’s so hard to figure. We’re not a special family anymore.”
“Why, sweetie, of course we’re special,” he said.
“We’ve turned uncertain. We’ve turned into worriers.”
“Bee, sweetie.”
“Isn’t it amazing?”
It was astounding, if he thought about it. But he was careful not to.
The weather began to grow warmer, and Doug raised all the windows and lugged the summer clothing down from the attic for Bee. Across the street, the foreigners came out in their shirtsleeves to install an electric garage-door opener they’d ordered from a catalog. Doug found this amusing. A door that opened on its own, for a car that could barely move on its own! Of course he kept them company while they worked, but the door in question was solid wood and very heavy, potentially lethal, and he’d just as soon not be standing under it when calamity struck. He stayed several feet away, watching Ollie teeter on a kitchen chair as he screwed something to a rafter overhead. Then when Doug got bored he ambled inside with the two who were less mechanically inclined, leaving