Saint Maybe (29 page)

“Honeybunch has worms,” Agatha told Ian.

“How do you know that?”

“You really want me to say?”

“On second thought, never mind,” Ian said. “So, what? We have to take her to the vet?”

“I made an appointment: tomorrow afternoon at four.”

She and Thomas sat on either side of Ian in the porch swing, enjoying the last of a golden autumn day. Down on the front walk, Daphne was playing hopscotch with the Carter girl and the newlyweds’ five-year-old. “You did step on the line, Tracy. You did,” she said in her raucous little voice.

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.

“Reason I know is, I phoned his mother. Mrs. Millet. She’d remarried, is the reason it took me a while. I told her I was a buddy of Tom’s wanting to get in
touch with him. I didn’t say no more though till I got your say-so. Should I go ahead now and pay her a visit?”

“No, never mind.”

“She’s bound to know the kids’ relatives. Small-town kind of lady; you could just tell she would know all about it.”

“Maybe I should get her address,” Ian said.

“Okay, suit yourself. Mrs. Margie Millet. Forty-three Orchard Road, Portia, Maryland. You need to write that down?”

“I have it,” Ian said. (He would have it forever, he felt—chiseled into his brain.) “Thanks, Eli. I appreciate your help. You know where to send the bill.”

“Aw, it won’t amount to much. This one was easy.”

For you, maybe
, Ian thought. He told Eli goodbye and hung up.

From the kitchen, his mother called, “Agatha? Time to set the table!”

“Coming.”

Ian met Agatha at the door and stepped past her onto the porch. She didn’t notice a thing.

The evening was several shades darker now, as if curtain after curtain had fallen in his absence. Thomas was swinging the swing hard enough to make the chains creak, and down on the sidewalk the little girls were still playing hopscotch. Ian paused to watch them. Something about the purposeful planting of small shoes within chalked squares tugged at him. He leaned on the railing and thought,
What does this remind me of? What? What?
Daphne tossed the pebble she used as a marker and it landed in the farthest square so crisply, so ringingly, that the sound seemed thrown back from a sky no higher than a ceiling, cupping all of Waverly Street just a few feet overhead.

* * *

“Lucy Ann Dean was as common as dirt,” Mrs. Millet said. “I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but there’s just no getting around it: she was common.”

They were sitting in Mrs. Millet’s Pennsylvania Dutch-style breakfast nook, all blue painted wood and cut-out hearts and tulips. (Her house was the kind where the living room waited in reserve for some momentous occasion that never arrived, and Ian had caught no more than a glimpse of its white shag rugs and white upholstery on his journey to the kitchen.) Mrs. Millet slouched across from him, opening a pack of cigarettes. She was younger than he had expected, with a very stiff, very brown hairdo and a hatchet face. Her magenta minidress struck him as outdated, although Ian was not the last word on fashion.

He himself wore a suit and tie, chosen with an eye to looking trustworthy. After all, how did she know he wasn’t some knock-and-rob man? He hadn’t phoned ahead because he hadn’t fully acknowledged he was planning this; he had dressed this morning only for church, he told himself, although he almost never wore a tie to church. After services he had eaten Sunday dinner with his family and then (yawning aloud and stretching in a stagy manner) had announced he was feeling so restless, he thought he might go for a drive. Whereupon he had headed north without consulting a map, relying on the proper road signs to appear or else not, as the case might be. And they did appear. The signs for Portia, the signs for Orchard Road. The giant brass 43 glittering, almost shouting, from the lamppost in front of the redwood cottage. “My name is Ian Bedloe,” he had said when she opened the door. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’m Lucy Dean’s brother-in-law and I’m trying to locate some of her family.”

She hadn’t exactly slammed the door in his face, but her expression had frozen over somehow. “Then maybe you better ask
her,”
she told him.

“Ask who?”

“Why, Lucy Dean, of course.”

“But … Lucy’s dead,” he said.

She stared at him.

“She died a long time ago,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, “I’d be fibbing if I said I was sorry. I always knew she was up to no good.”

He was shamed by the rush of pleasure he felt—the bitter, wicked pleasure of hearing someone else agree with him at long last.

Now she said, “First off, her parents drank.” She took a cigarette from her pack and tamped it against the table. “How do you suppose they had that car wreck? Three sheets to the wind, both of them. Then her aunt Alice moved in with her, and she was just plain cracked, if you want my honest opinion. I don’t think the two of them had anything to do with each other. It’s more like Lucy just raised herself. Well, for that much I give her credit: she’d come out of that run-down shack every morning neat as a pin, every hair in place, every accessory matching, which heaven knows how she did on their little pittance of money …”

She stole it, is how. Shoplifted. Not even you know the worst of it
.

“… and she’d sashay off to school all prissy and Miss America with her books held in front of her chest. The boys were fools for her, but my Tommy was the only one she’d look at. You should’ve seen my Tommy. He was movie-star handsome. He could pass for Tony Curtis, ought to give you some idea. He and Lucy went steady from ninth grade on. Went to every dance and sports event together. Well, excepting Junior Prom. They had a little disagreement the week before Junior Prom and she went with Gary Durbin, but Tommy beat Gary to a pulp next morning and him and Lucy got back together. At their Senior Prom they were King and
Queen. I still have the pictures. Tommy wore a tux and he looked good enough to eat. I said, ‘Tommy, you could have any girl you wanted,’ but then, well, you guessed it.”

She lit her cigarette and tilted her head and blew out a long stream of smoke, all the while staring defiantly at Ian. He said, “I did?”

“Lucy went and got herself pregnant.”

“Oh.”

“I said, ‘Tommy, you can’t be certain that baby’s even yours,’ and he said, ‘Mom, I know it. I just don’t know what on earth I’m going to do,’ he told me.”

Ian said, “What?” He felt he’d missed something. “You mean it could have been someone else’s baby?” he asked.

“Well, who can say?” Mrs. Millet said. “I mean life is all so iffy, right? I said, ‘Tommy,
don’t
fall for this! You could be anything! You could be a male model, even! Why saddle yourself with a wife and kid?’ But Lucy talked him into it. She had him wrapped around her little finger, I tell you. It was the kind of thing that just breaks a mother’s heart.”

“So … but this aunt of hers,” Ian said. He seemed to be losing track of the purpose of his visit. “Alice, you say.”

“Alice Dean. Well, she had nothing against it. She was delighted to marry Lucy off. Meant she could get back to wherever she came from and her old-maid ways. So Tommy and Lucy set up house in this crummy little trailer over at Blalock’s Trailer Park and Tommy started work at Luther’s Sports Equipment, but when Lucy told him she was expecting
again—
two babies in three years!—he left her. I don’t blame him, either. I do not blame him. He was just a boy! ‘When you going to do this, when you going to do that?’ she was always asking, but he hadn’t had him any kind of life yet!
Naturally
he wanted to roam a bit. She claimed he was irresponsible and she fretted about the least little thing, so of course he stayed away even more and when he did come home they’d fight. Twice the police had to be called. Then thank the Lord, he finally had the sense to leave. Got shed of her and asked for a divorce. And wouldn’t you know she hired herself a big-shot city lawyer and sued for child support. Proves what I’d been telling him: all as she was after was his money. Someone to support those kids; by then she’d had the second one and she was always yammering about, ‘I can’t feed these kids on yard weeds,’ and such. I told Tommy, I said, ‘She should just go to work, if she needs money so bad.’ ”

“But then who would watch the children?” Ian asked.

“Lord, you sound just like her. ‘Then who would watch the children?’ ” Mrs. Millet mimicked in a high voice. She flicked her cigarette into a tin ashtray. “She should’ve got a sitter, of course. That’s what I told Tommy. ‘And don’t expect
me
to sit,’ I told him. I never did like other people’s children much. So anyhow, Tommy hung around here awhiles but there wasn’t all that much for him in Portia, and so finally he hitchhiked to Wyoming. He had in mind to find work there, something glamorous having to do with horses. Well, that didn’t quite come through like he had hoped and so of course he couldn’t send money first thing, but he was planning to! And then we hear Lucy’s run off.”

“Runoff?”

“Run away with some man. That lawyer that handled her divorce. It was Mr. Blalock called and told me, down at the trailer park. She owed him rent. He said her trailer was empty as last year’s bird nest, door flapping open in the wind and everything hauled away that wasn’t nailed down. Said her neighbors saw a moving van come to take her belongings. Not a U-Haul; a professional
van. The man was loaded, was what they guessed. She must’ve went with him for the money.”

“Went with him where?” Ian asked.

“Why, to Baltimore, but at first we didn’t know that. At first we had no idea, and I told Tommy he was better off that way. The slate has been wiped clean,’ I told him on the phone. ‘I do believe we’ve seen the last of her.’ But
then
guess what. She calls him up a few months later. Calls him in Cheyenne. Tells him she’s in Baltimore and wants the money he owes her. Oh, I just wish I’d have been on the other end of the line. I’d have hung up on her so fast! But Tommy, I will say, he was a whole lot smarter by then. He says, ‘I thought you had yourself some rich guy now,’ and she says, ‘Oh,’ says, ‘that didn’t work out.’ Well, I just bet it didn’t work out. I bet the fellow was married, was what. That’s the kind of thing you see happen every day. Tommy tells her, ‘I can’t help
that
, I met somebody here and we’re planning on a June wedding. All I got is going for the wedding,’ he says. Then he says, ‘And anyhow, where’s my things? You took every blasted thing I left in that trailer,’ he says. ‘Stuff I was coming back to fetch someday you packed up and hauled away like it belonged to you.’ ‘Tommy, I need money,’ she says. ‘I’m in a awful fix right now.’ He says, ‘First you send me my things,’ and signs off. You see how he’d got wise to her. Oh, she aged him, I tell you. She hardened him. She callused him.”