The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [110]
“I see,” Macon said.
“It was like I had, you know, cured him, just so he could elope with another woman.”
“Well,” he said.
“You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you, Macon?”
“Who, me?”
“Would you elope with someone else? Would you see someone else behind my back?”
“Oh, Muriel, of course not,” he told her.
“Would you leave me and go home to your wife?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Would you?”
“Don’t be silly,” he said.
She cocked her head and considered him. Her eyes were alert and bright and knowing, like the eyes of some small animal.
It was a rainy Tuesday morning and Edward, who was squeamish about rain, insisted he didn’t need to go out, but Macon took him anyway. While he was waiting in the backyard beneath his umbrella, he saw a young couple walking down the alley. They caught his attention because they walked so slowly, as if they didn’t realize they were getting wet. The boy was tall and frail, in ragged jeans and a soft white shirt. The girl wore a flat straw hat with ribbons down the back and a longish limp cotton dress. They swung hands, looking only at each other. They came upon a tricycle and they separated to walk around it; only instead of simply walking the girl did a little sort of dance step, spinning her skirt out, and the boy spun too and laughed and took her hand again.
Edward finally, finally peed, and Macon followed him back into the house. He set his umbrella in the kitchen sink and squatted to dry Edward off with an old beach towel. He rubbed briskly at first, and then more slowly. Then he stopped but remained on the floor, the towel bunched in his hands, the tin-can smell of wet dog rising all around him.
When he’d asked Sarah whether she was living with anyone, and Sarah had said, “Not really,” what exactly had she meant by that?
The rain stopped and they put Edward on his leash and went out shopping. Muriel needed bedroom slippers with feathers on them. “Red. High-heeled. Pointy-toed,” she said.
“Goodness. Whatever for?” Macon asked her.
“I want to clop around the house in them on Sunday mornings. Can’t you just see it? I wish I smoked cigarettes. I wish Alexander wasn’t allergic to smoke.”
Yes, he could see it, as a matter of fact. “In your black-and-gold kimono,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“But I don’t believe they sell those feathered slippers anymore.”
“In thrift shops they do.”
“Oh. Right.”
Lately, Macon had begun to like thrift shops himself. In the usual sea of plastic he had found, so far, a folding boxwood carpenter’s rule, an ingenious wheeled cookie cutter that left no waste space between cookies, and a miniature brass level for Alexander’s toolbox.
The air outside was warm and watery. Mrs. Butler was propping up the squashed geraniums that flopped in the white-washed tire in her yard. Mrs. Patel—out of her luminous sari for once, clumsy and unromantic in tight, bulgy Calvin Klein jeans—was sweeping the puddles off her front steps. And Mrs. Saddler stood in front of the hardware store waiting for it to open. “I don’t guess you’d have seen Dominick,” she said to Muriel.
“Not lately.”
“Last night he never came home,” Mrs. Saddler said. “That boy just worries the daylights out of me. He’s not what you would call bad,” she told Macon, “but he’s worrisome, know what I mean? When he’s at home he’s so much at home, those big noisy boots all over the place, but then when he’s away he’s so much away. You wouldn’t believe how the house feels; just empty. Just echoing.”
“He’ll be back,” Muriel said. “Tonight’s his turn to have the car.”
“Oh, and when he’s out with the car it’s worst of all,” Mrs. Saddler said. “Then every siren I hear, I wonder if it’s Dommie. I know how he screeches round corners! I know those fast girls he goes out with!”
They left her still standing there, distractedly fingering her coin purse, although the hardware-store owner had unlocked his door by now and was cranking down his awnings.
Outside a shop