Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [95]
Ian said, “Maybe Grandpa could drive you. I could leave the car with him tomorrow and take the bus.”
“We like it better when you come,” Agatha said.
“Well, but I have work.”
“Please, Ian,” Thomas said. “Grandpa drove us when we went to get her cat shots and he yelled at her for sitting on his foot.”
“His accelerator foot,” Agatha explained.
“We like it better when you’re there, acting in charge,” Thomas told him.
Ian looked at him a moment. His mind had drifted elsewhere. “Thomas,” he said, “remember that big doll you used to carry around?”
“Oh, well, that was a long time ago,” Thomas said.
“Yes, but I was wondering. How come you named her Dulcimer?”
“I don’t even know where she is anymore. I don’t know why I named her that,” Thomas said.
He seemed embarrassed, rather than secretive. And Agatha wasn’t listening. You’d think she would suspect; she was the one who’d kept that box hidden away. But she stirred the porch swing dreamily with one foot. “Suppose we got bombed,” she said to Ian.
“Pardon?”
He saw the stationery box in his mind: the dust on the lid, the congealed sheaf of papers. She must not have glanced inside for years, he realized. She might even have forgotten it existed.
“Suppose Baltimore got atom-bombed,” she was saying. “Know what I’d do?”
“You wouldn’t do a thing,” Thomas told her. “You’d be dead.”
“No, seriously. I’ve been thinking. I’d break into a supermarket, and I’d settle our family inside. That way we’d have all the supplies we needed. Canned goods and bottled goods, enough to last us forever.”
“Well, not forever,” Thomas said.
“Long enough to get over the radiation, though.”
“Not a chance. Right, Ian?”
Ian said, “Hmm?”
“The radiation would last for years, right?”
“Well, so would the canned goods,” Agatha said. “And if we still had electricity—”
“Electricity! Ha!” Thomas said. “Do you ever live in a dream world!”
“Well, even without electricity,” Agatha said stubbornly, “we could manage. Nowadays supermarkets sell blankets, even. And socks! And prescription drugs, the bigger places. We could get penicillin and stuff. And some way we’d bring Claudia and them from Pittsburgh, I haven’t figured just how, yet—”
“Forget it, Ag,” Thomas told her. “That’s ten more mouths to feed.”
“But we need a lot of kids. They’re the future generation. And Grandma and Grandpa are the old folks who would teach us how to carry on.”
“How about Ian?” Thomas asked.
“How about him?”
“He’s not old. And he’s not the future generation, either. You have to draw the line somewhere.”
“Gee, thanks,” Ian said, lazily toeing the swing. But Agatha turned a pensive gaze on him.
“No,” she said finally, “Ian comes too. He’s the one who keeps us all together.”
“The cowpoke of the family, so to speak,” Ian told Thomas. But he felt touched. And when his father called from the doorway—“Ian? Telephone”—he rested a palm on Agatha’s thick black hair a second as he rose.
The receiver lay next to the phone on the front hall table. He picked it up and said, “Hello?”
“Brother Ian? Wallah,” a man said from a distance.
“Pardon?”
“This is Eli Everjohn. Wallah, I said.”
“Wallah?”
“Wallah! I found your man.”
“You … what?”
“Except he’s dead,”
Eli said. Ian leaned one shoulder against the wall.
“Appears he didn’t live much past what your sister-in-law did. Hello? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Maybe this is a shock.”
“No, that’s all right,” Ian said.
The shock was not Tom Dulsimore’s death but the fact that he had lived at all—that someone else in the world had turned up actual evidence of him.
But Eli started breaking the news all over again, this time more delicately. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Thomas Dulsimore, Senior has passed away,” he said. “Had himself a motorcycle crash back in nineteen sixty-seven.”
“ ’Sixty-seven,” Ian said.
“Seems he was one of those folks that don’t hold with helmets.”
So Tom Dulsimore was not an option anymore—not even in Ian’s fantasies.