The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [89]
Mrs. Dugan studied him, pursing her lips. Lines radiated from the corners of her mouth like cat whiskers. “Pleased to meet you,” she said finally.
“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Dugan,” Macon said. He handed her his gift—a bottle of cranberry liqueur with a ribbon tied around it. She studied that, too.
“Just put the rest of those things under the tree,” Muriel told Macon. “Ma, aren’t you going to say hello to your grandson?”
Mrs. Dugan glanced briefly at Alexander. He must not have expected anything more; he was already wandering over to the Christmas tree. Unrelated objects sat beneath it—a smoke detector, an electric drill, a makeup mirror encircled with light bulbs. Macon laid Muriel’s packages next to them, and then he removed his coat and draped it across the arm of a white satin couch. Fully a third of the couch was occupied by the microwave oven, still jauntily decorated with a large red bow. “Look at my new microwave,” Mrs. Dugan said. “If that’s not just the weirdest durn thing I ever laid eyes on.” She cleared a crumple of gift wrap off an armchair and waved Macon into it.
“Something certainly smells good,” he said.
“Goose,” she told him. “Boyd went and shot me a goose.”
She sat down next to the oven. Claire was on the floor with Alexander, helping him open a package. Muriel, still in her coat, scanned a row of books on a shelf. “Ma—” she said. “No, never mind, I found it.” She came over to Macon with a photo album, the modern kind with clear plastic pages. “Look here,” she said, perching on the arm of his chair. “Pictures of me when I was little.”
“Why not take off your coat and stay a while,” Mrs. Dugan told her.
“Me at six months. Me in my stroller. Me and my first birthday cake.”
They were color photos, shiny, the reds a little too blue. (Macon’s own baby pictures were black-and-white, which was all that was generally available back then.) Each showed her to be a chubby, giggling blonde, usually with her hair fixed in some coquettish style— tied in a sprig at the top of her head, or in double ponytails so highly placed they looked like puppy ears. At first the stages of her life passed slowly—it took her three full pages to learn to walk—but then they speeded up. “Me at two. Me at five. Me when I was seven and a half.” The chubby blonde turned thin and dark and sober and then vanished altogether, replaced by the infant Claire. Muriel said, “Oh, well,” and snapped the album shut just midway through. “Wait,” Macon told her. He had an urge to see her at her worst, at her most outlandish, hanging out with motorcycle gangs. But when he took the album away from her and flipped to the very last pages, they were blank.
Mr. Dugan wandered in—a fair, freckled man in a plaid flannel shirt—and gave Macon a callused hand to shake and then wandered out again, mumbling something about the basement. “He’s fretting over the pipes,” Mrs. Dugan explained. “Last night it got down below zero, did you know that? He’s worried the pipes’ll freeze.”
“Oh, could I help?” Macon asked, perking up.
“Now, you just sit right where you are, Mr. Leary.”
“Macon,” he said.
“Macon. And you can call me Mother Dugan.”
“Um . . .”
“Muriel tells me you’re separated, Macon.”
“Well, yes, I am.”
“Do you think it’s going to take?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean you’re not just leading this child around Robin Hood’s barn now, are you?”
“Ma, quit that,” Muriel said.
“Well, I wouldn’t have to ask, Muriel, if you had ever showed the least bit of common sense on your own. I mean face it, you don’t have such a great track record.”
“She’s just worried for me,” Muriel told Macon.
“Well, of course,” he said.
“This girl was not but thirteen years old,” Mrs. Dugan said, “when all at once it seemed boys of the very slipperiest character just came crawling out of the woodwork. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”
“Well, I don’t know why not,” Muriel told her. “That was years and years ago.”
“Seemed every time we turned around, off she’d gone to the Surf’n’Turf or the Torch Club