Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [86]
This afternoon she was helping Bert with his bureau. (She didn’t know enough yet to be entrusted with a piece all her own.) Her job was to attach the drawer knobs—perfectly plain beechwood cylinders—but she kept leaving them to come over and talk to Ian. “Pretty,” she said of the desk. Then, without a pause, “You like nature, Ian?”
“Nature? Sure.”
“Me and some friends are taking a picnic lunch to Loch Raven this Sunday. Want to come?”
“Well, I have church on Sundays,” Ian told her.
“Church,” she said. She rocked back on the heels of her moccasins. “But how about after church?” she said. “We wouldn’t be leaving till one or so.”
“Oh, uh, there’s my nephew and nieces, too,” Ian said. “I sort of have to keep an eye on them on weekends.”
“Why can’t their parents do that?”
“Their parents are dead.”
“Their grandparents, then,” she said, instantly readjusting.
“My mother’s got arthritis and my dad is kind of tied up.”
“Or the other grandparents! Or other aunts and uncles! Or baby-sitters! Or can’t the older ones watch the younger ones? Or maybe you could call the mothers of some of their school friends and see if—”
“It’s kind of involved,” Ian said. He was surprised at the number of options that could be produced at such short notice. “I guess I’d just better say no,” he told her.
“Christ,” she said, “what a drag. Why, even chain gangs get their Sundays off.”
Then Mr. Brant called, “Jeannie!” He towered over the bureau, glaring in her direction, and she said, “Oops! Gotta go.”
She skipped away, a juicy morsel of a girl, and Ian noticed how her long hair swung against the tight-packed seat of her jeans.
He had made it up about the children, of course. They were well past the stage when they needed sitters. But somehow he began to believe his own alibi, and as he watched her he thought, Right! Even chain gangs, he thought, are allowed a little time to themselves.
Well, no one had ever said this would be easy.
But then why didn’t he feel forgiven? Why didn’t he, after all these years of penance, feel that God had forgiven him?
* * *
The little black cat settled in immediately. She was very polite and clean, with a smell like new woolen yarn, and she tolerated any amount of petting. Daphne named her Honeybunch. Thomas named her Alexandra. Any time one would call her, the other would call louder. “Here, Honeybunch.” “No, Alexandra! Here, Alexandra, you know who you love best.” Agatha stayed out of it. She was abstracted all that weekend, moping because a classmate had thrown a party without inviting her. The reason Ian knew this was that Thomas announced it, cruelly, during Saturday night supper. Agatha had told Thomas he was piggish to chew with his mouth open, and Thomas said, “Well, at least I don’t have to buy my clothes in the Chubbette department. At least I’m not so fat that Missy Perkins wouldn’t ask me to her slumber party!” Then Agatha threw down her napkin and bolted from the table, and Daphne said, in a satisfied tone, “You’re a meanie, Thomas.”
“Am not.”
“Are so.”
“She started it.”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
“Quit that,” Ian said. “Both of you may be excused.”
“Why do I have to go when he’s the one who—”
“You’re excused, I said.”
They left, grumbling under their breaths as they moved into the living room.
Supper was more or less finished, anyhow. Ian’s father had already pushed away his plate and tilted back in his chair, and his mother was merely toying with her dessert. She hadn’t taken a bite in the last five minutes; she was deep in one of her blow-by-blow household sagas, and it seemed she would never get around to eating her last half-globe of canned peach.
“So there I was in the basement,” she said, “looking at all this water full of let’s-not-discuss-it, and the man pulled a kind of zippery tube from his machine and twined it down the …”
Ian started thinking about the comics.