Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [99]
She sat down.
Ian’s cheeks felt hot.
Surely private detectives were sworn to secrecy, weren’t they? Just like lawyers, or doctors. Weren’t they?
Reverend Emmett looked uncertain. He said, “Well …” and glanced around at the other worshipers. His eyes did not linger noticeably on Ian, although of course he must suspect. “Does this person wish to ask for our prayers?” he said.
No response. Just a few rustles and whispers.
“In that case,” Reverend Emmett said, “we won’t intrude. Let us pray, instead, for all of us. For all of us to know that we can bring our problems to God whenever we feel ready to let go of them.”
He raised his arms and the silence fell, as if he had somehow cast it forth in front of him.
Sister Bertha is a nosy-bones, Ian thought distinctly. And I hate that tomato-soup color she dyes her hair.
After the Benediction, he was the first one out the door. He left behind even Mrs. Jordan, who most likely would want to walk home with him, and he set off at a brisk, angry pace. So the last thing he expected to hear was Reverend Emmett calling his name. “Brother Ian!”
Ian stopped and turned.
The man must have run the whole way. He must have left his flock unattended, his Bible open on the counter, his church lit up and unlocked. But he wasn’t even breathing hard. He approached at a saunter, seemingly absorbed in slipping on a cardigan the same color as the dusk.
“May I tag along?” he asked.
Ian shrugged.
They set off together more slowly.
“Of course, it does come down to whether a person feels ready to let go,” Reverend Emmett said in the most conversational tone.
Ian kicked a Dixie cup out of his path.
“Some people prefer to hug their problems to themselves,” Reverend Emmett said.
Ian wheeled on him, clenching his fists in his pockets. He said, “This is my life? This is all I get? It’s so settled! It’s so cut and dried! After this there’s no changing! I just lean into the burden of those children forever, is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” Reverend Emmett told him.
“You said that! You said to lean into my burden!”
“But those children will be grown in no time,” Reverend Emmett said. “They are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness.”
“Okay,” Ian said. “Fine. How much longer till I’m forgiven?”
“No, no. The burden is that you must forgive.”
“Me?” Ian said. He stared at Reverend Emmett. “Forgive who?”
“Why, your brother and his wife, of course.”
Ian said nothing.
Finally Reverend Emmett asked, “Shall we walk on?”
So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow—not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.
7
Organized Marriage
It was Agatha who came up with the notion of finding Ian a wife. Agatha was graduating that June; she’d had word she’d been accepted at her first-choice college; she would soon be leaving the family forever. And one night in April she walked into the living room and told the other two, “I’m worried about Ian.”
Thomas and Daphne glanced over at her. (There was a commercial on just then, anyhow.) She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, her tortoiseshell glasses propped on top of her head in a purposeful, no-nonsense manner. “Who will keep him company after we’re gone?” she asked.
“You’re the only one going,” Daphne told her. “He’s still got me and Thomas.”
“Not for long,” Agatha said.
Their eyes slid back to the Late Late Movie.
But they knew she had a point. In a sense, Thomas was already gone. He was a freshman in high school now and he had a whole outside existence—a raft of friends and a girlfriend and an extracurricular