The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [119]
He asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, and I apologize a thousand times,” she said. And she patted the brooch at her throat.
When the drink cart came he ordered her another sherry, which he insisted on paying for, and he ordered one for himself as well, even though he didn’t plan to drink it. He thought it might be needed for Mrs. Bunn. He was right, as things turned out, because their flight was unusually rough. The seatbelt sign stayed lit the whole way, and the plane bounced and grated as if rolling over gravel. Every now and then it dropped sharply and Mrs. Bunn winced, but she went on taking tiny sips of sherry. “This is nothing,” Macon told her. “I’ve been in much worse than this.” He told her how to give with the bumps. “It’s like traveling on a boat,” he said. “Or on wheels, on roller skates. You keep your knees loose. You bend. Do you understand what I’m saying? You go along with it. You ride it out.”
Mrs. Bunn said she’d certainly try.
Not only was the air unsteady, but also little things kept going wrong inside the plane. The drink cart raced away from the stewardess every time she let go of it. Mrs. Bunn’s tray fell into her lap twice without warning. At each new mishap Macon laughed and said, “Ah, me,” and shook his head. “Oh, not again,” he said. Mrs. Bunn’s eyes remained fixed on his face, as if Macon were her only hope. Once there was a bang and she jumped; the door to the cockpit had flung itself open for no good reason. “What? What?” she said, but Macon pointed out that now she could see for herself how unconcerned the pilot was. They were close enough to the front so she could even hear what the pilot was talking about; he was shouting some question to the copilot, asking why any ten-year-old girl with half a grain of sense would wear a metal nightbrace in a sauna room. “You call that a worried man?” Macon asked Mrs. Bunn. “You think a man about to bail out of his plane would be discussing orthodontia?”
“Bail out!” Mrs. Bunn said. “Oh, my, I never thought of that!”
Macon laughed again.
He was reminded of a trip he’d taken alone as a boy, touring colleges. Heady with his new independence, he had lied to the man sitting next to him and said he came from Kenya, where his father led safaris. In the same way he was lying now, presenting himself to Mrs. Bunn as this merry, tolerant person.
But after they had landed (with Mrs. Bunn hardly flinching, bolstered by all those sherries), and she had gone off with her grown daughter, a very small child ran headlong into Macon’s kneecap. This child was followed by another and another, all more or less the same size—some kind of nursery school, Macon supposed, visiting the airport on a field trip—and each child, as if powerless to veer from the course the first had set, careened off Macon’s knees and said, “Oops!” The call ran down the line like little bird cries—“Oops!” “Oops!” “Oops!”—while behind the children, a harassed-looking woman clapped a hand to her cheek. “Sorry,” she said to Macon, and he said, “No harm done.”
Only later, when he passed a mirror and noticed the grin on his face, did he realize that, in fact, he might not have been lying to Mrs. Bunn after all.
“The plumber says it won’t be hard to fix,” Sarah told him. “He says it looks bad but really just one pipe is cracked.”
“Well, good,” Macon said.
He was not as surprised this time by her call, of course, but he did feel there was something disconcerting about it—standing in an Edmonton hotel room on a weekday afternoon, listening to Sarah’s voice at the other end of the line.
“I went over there this morning and straightened up a little,” she said. “Everything’s so disorganized.”
“Disorganized?”
“Why are some of the sheets sewn in half? And the popcorn popper’s in the bedroom. Were you eating popcorn in the bedroom?”
“I guess I must have been,” he