“Wonderful,” Macon said when the screwdriver finally connected.
At each infinitesimal turn, though, it slipped and had to be repositioned. Macon’s stomach muscles felt tight. Muriel, for once, was silent, and her silence was strained and anxious.
Then, “Ah!” Macon said. The screw had loosened enough so that Alexander could twist it by hand. He managed that part fairly easily. He even removed the faucet without being told. “Very good,” Macon said. “I believe you may have natural talents.”
Muriel relaxed. Leaning back against the counter, she said, “My folks have their Christmas dinner in the daytime. I mean it’s not at noon but it’s not at night either, it’s more like midafternoon, or this year it’s really late afternoon because I’ve got the morning shift at the Meow-Bow and—”
“Look at this,” Macon told Alexander. “See that gunk? That’s old, rotted packing. So take it away. Right. Now here’s the new packing. You wind it around, wind even a little more than you need. Let’s see you wind it around.”
Alexander wrapped the thread. His fingers turned white with the effort. Muriel said, “Usually we have a goose. My daddy brings a goose from the Eastern Shore. Or don’t you care for goose. Would you rather just a turkey? A duck? What are you used to eating, Macon?”
Macon said, “Oh, well . . .” and was saved by Alexander. Alexander turned, having reassembled the faucet without any help, and said, “Now what?”
“Now make sure the screw is well in.”
Alexander resumed his struggles with the screwdriver. Muriel said, “Maybe you’d rather a good hunk of beef. I know some men are like that. They think poultry is kind of pansy. Is that how you think too? You can tell me! I won’t mind! My folks won’t mind!”
“Oh, um, Muriel . . .”
“Now what,” Alexander ordered.
“Why, now we turn the water back on and see what kind of job you’ve done.”
Macon crouched beneath the sink and showed him where the valve was. Alexander reached past him and twisted it, grunting. Wasn’t it odd, Macon thought, how little boys all had that same slightly green smell, like a cedar closet. He rose and turned on the faucet. No leak. “Look at that!” he told Alexander. “You’ve solved the problem.”
Alexander fought to hold a grin back.
“Will you know how to do it the next time?”
He nodded.
“Now when you’re grown,” Macon said, “you can fix the faucets for your wife.”
Alexander’s face squinched up with amusement at the thought.
“ ‘Step back, dearie,’ you can say. ‘Just let me see to this.’ ”
Alexander said, “Tssh!”—his face like a little drawstring purse.
“ ‘Let a real man take care of this,’ you can tell her.”
“Tssh! Tssh!”
“Macon? Are you coming to my folks’, or aren’t you?” Muriel asked.
It seemed unreasonable to say he wasn’t. Somehow or other, he had got himself involved already.
thirteen
Muriel’s parents lived out in Timonium, in a development called Foxhunt Acres. Muriel had to show Macon the way. It was the coldest Christmas Day either of them could remember, but they drove with the windows slightly open so that Alexander, riding in back, would not be bothered by the dog hair. The radio was tuned to Muriel’s favorite station. Connie Francis was singing “Baby’s First Christmas.”
“You warm enough?” Muriel asked Alexander. “You doing okay?”
Alexander must have nodded.
“You feel like you’re wheezing at all?”
“Nope.”
“No, ma’am,” she corrected him.
Sarah used to do that, too, Macon remembered—give their son a crash course in manners anytime they set out to visit her mother.
Muriel said, “Once I was riding Alexander uptown on some errands for George? My company? And I had these two cats in the car just the day before? And I didn’t think a thing about it, clean forgot to vacuum like I usually do, and all at once I turn around and Alexander’s stretched across the seat, flat out.”
“I wasn’t flat out,” Alexander said.
“You were just as good as.”
“I was only laying down so I wouldn’t need so much air.”
“See there?” Muriel said to Macon.
They were traveling up York Road now, past body shops and fast food outlets all closed and bleak. Macon had never seen this road so empty. He overtook a van and then a taxicab; nothing else. Swags of Christmas greens hung stiffly above a used car lot.
“He can get shots, though,” Muriel said.
“Shots?”
“He can get shots to keep him from wheezing.”
“Then why doesn’t he?”
“Well, if Edward was to move in I guess that’s what we’d do.”
“Edward?”
“I mean if, you know. If you moved in on a permanent basis and Edward came too.”
“Oh,” Macon said.
Brenda Lee was singing “I’m Gonna Lasso Santa Claus.” Muriel hummed along, tipping her head perkily left and right to keep time.
“Would you ever think of doing that?” she asked him finally.
“Doing what?” he said, pretending not to know.
“Would you ever think of moving in with us?”
“Oh, um . . .”
“Or we could move in with you,” she said. “Either way you preferred.”
“With me? But my sister and my—”
“I’m talking about your house.”
“Oh. My house.”
His house swam up before him—small and dim and abandoned, hunkered beneath the oak trees like a woodchopper’s cottage in a fairy tale. Muriel glanced at his face and then said, quickly, “I could understand if you didn’t want to go back there.”
“It’s not that,” he said. He cleared his throat. He said, “It’s just that I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Oh, I understand!”
“Not yet, at least.”
“You don’t have to explain!”
She pointed out where to turn, and they started down a winding road. The eating places grew sparser and shabbier. There were scratchy little trees, frozen fields, a whole village of different-sized mailboxes bristling at the end of a driveway.
Every time the car jounced, something rattled on the backseat. That was Macon’s Christmas present to Alexander—a kit full of tools that were undersized but real, with solid wooden handles. Macon had hunted those tools down one by one. He had rearranged them in their compartments a dozen times at least, like a miser counting his money.
They passed a segment of rickrack fence that was dissolving back into the ground. Muriel said, “What is your family doing today?”
“Oh, nothing much.”
“Having a big Christmas dinner?”
“No, Rose has gone to Julian’s. Charles and Porter are, I don’t know, I think they said something about caulking the second-floor bathtub.”
“Oh, the poor things! They should have come with us to my folks’.”
Macon smiled, picturing that.
He turned where she directed, into a meadow dotted with houses. All were built to the same general plan—brick with half-stories of aluminum siding above. The streets were named for trees that weren’t there, Birch Lane and Elm Court and Apple Blossom Way. Muriel had him make a right onto Apple Blossom Way. He pulled up behind a station wagon. A girl burst out of the house—a chunky, pretty teenager in blue jeans and a long yellow ponytail. “Claire!” Alexander shouted, bouncing in his seat.
“That’s my sister,” Muriel told Macon.
“Ah.”
“Do you think she’s good-looking?”
“Yes, she’s very good-looking.”
Claire had the car door open by now and was hoisting Alexander into her arms. “How’s my fellow?” she was asking. “What did Santa Claus bring you?” She was so unlike Muriel that you’d never guess they were siste
rs. Her face was almost square, and her skin was golden, and by present-day standards she was probably ten pounds overweight. After she’d set Alexander down, she stuffed her hands awkwardly into the back pockets of her jeans. “So anyhow,” she told Macon and Muriel. “Merry Christmas, and all that.”
“Look,” Muriel said, flashing a wristwatch. “See what Macon gave me.”
“What’d you give him?”
“A key tag from a thrift shop. Antique.”
“Oh.”
With her house key attached, Muriel had neglected to say.
Macon unloaded things from the trunk—Muriel’s presents for her family, along with his hostess gift—and Alexander took his toolbox from the backseat. They followed Claire across the yard. Muriel was anxiously feeling her hair as she walked. “You ought to see what Daddy gave Ma,” Claire told her. “Gave her a microwave oven. Ma says she’s scared to death of it. ‘I just know I’ll get radiation,’ she says. We’re worried she won’t use it.”
The door was held open for them by a small, skinny, gray woman in an aqua pantsuit. “Ma, this is Macon,” Muriel said. “Macon, this is my mother.”
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 or the Hi-Times Lounge on Highway Forty.”
“Ma, will you please open up you and Daddy’s Christmas present?”
“Oh, did you bring us a present?”
Muriel rose to fetch it from under the tree, where Claire sat with Alexander. She was helping him set up some little cardboard figures. “This one goes on the green. This one goes on the blue,” she said. Alexander jittered next to her, impatient to take over.
“Claire was the one who picked that game for him,” Mrs. Dugan said, accepting the package Muriel handed her. “I thought it was too advanced, myself.”
“It is not,” Muriel said (although she hadn’t even glanced at it). She returned to Macon’s chair. “Alexander’s just as smart as a tack. He’ll catch on in no time.”
“Nobody said he wasn’t smart, Muriel. You don’t have to take offense at every little thing a person says.”
“Will you just open your present?”
But Mrs. Dugan proceeded at her own pace. She took off the ribbon and laid it in a box on the coffee table. “Your daddy has a bit of cash for your Christmas,” she told Muriel. “Remind him before you go.” She examined the wrapping. “Will you look at that! Teeny little Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeers all over it. Real aluminum foil for their noses. I don’t know why you couldn’t just use tissue like I do.”
“I wanted it to be special,” Muriel told her.
Mrs. Dugan took off the paper, folded it, and laid it aside. Her gift was something in a gilded frame. “Well, isn’t that nice,” she said finally. She turned it toward Macon. It was a picture of Muriel and Alexander—a studio portrait in dreamy pastels, the lighting so even that it seemed to be coming from no particular place at all. Muriel was seated and Alexander stood beside her, one hand resting delicately upon her shoulder. Neither of them smiled. They looked wary and uncertain, and very much alone.
Macon said, “It’s beautiful.”
Mrs. Dugan only grunted and leaned forward to lay the photo beside the box of ribbons.
Dinner was an industrious affair, with everyone working away at the food—goose, cranberry relish, two kinds of potatoes, and three kinds of vegetables. Mr. Dugan remained spookily quiet, although Macon offered him several openers about the basement plumbing. Muriel devoted herself to Alexander. “There’s bread in that stuffing, Alexander. Put it back this instant. You want your allergy to start up? I wouldn’t trust that relish, either.”
“Oh, for Lord’s sake, let him be,” Mrs. Dugan said.
“You wouldn’t say that if it was you he kept awake at night with itchy rashes.”
“Half the time I believe you bring on those rashes yourself with
all your talk,” Mrs. Dugan said.
“That just shows how much you know about it.”
Macon had a sudden feeling of dislocation. What would Sarah say if she could see him here? He imagined her amused, ironic expression. Rose and his brothers would just look baffled. Julian would say, “Ha! Accidental Tourist in Timonium.”
Mrs. Dugan brought out three different pies, and Claire scurried around with the coffeepot. Over her jeans now she wore an embroidered dirndl skirt—her gift from Muriel, purchased last week at Value Village. Her layers of clothing reminded Macon of some native costume. “What about the liqueur?” she asked her mother. “Shall I set out Macon’s liqueur?”
“Maybe he wants you to call him Mr. Leary, hon.”
“No, please, Macon’s fine,” he said.
He supposed there’d been a lot of discussion about his age. Oh, no doubt about it: He was too old, he was too tall, he was too dressed up in his suit and tie.
Mrs. Dugan said the liqueur was just about the best thing she’d ever drunk. Macon himself found it similar to the fluoride mixture his dentist coated his teeth with; he’d envisioned something different. Mr. Dugan said, “Well, these sweet-tasting, pretty-colored drinks are all very well for the ladies, but personally I favor a little sipping whiskey, don’t you, Macon?” and he rose and brought back a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and two shot glasses. The mere weight of the bottle in his hand seemed to loosen his tongue. “So!” he said, sitting down. “What you driving these days, Macon?”
“Driving? Oh, um, a Toyota.”
Mr. Dugan frowned. Claire giggled. “Daddy hates and despises foreign cars,” she told Macon.
“What is it, you don’t believe in buying American?” Mr. Dugan asked him.
“Well, as a matter of fact—”
As a matter of fact his wife drove a Ford, he’d been going to say, but he changed his mind. He took the glass that Mr. Dugan held out to him. “I did once have a Rambler,” he said.