Saint Maybe

6. Sample Rains

Every Saturday morning, the Church of the Second Chance gathered to perform good works. Sometimes they went to an ailing member’s place and helped with the cleaning or the fixing up. Sometimes they went to some stranger. Today — a warm, sunny day in early September — they met at the little house where Reverend Emmett lived with his widowed mother. Reverend Emmett was not a salaried minister. His sole means of support was a part-time counseling job at a private girls’ school. So when his house needed painting (as it sorely did now, with the old paint hanging in ribbons off the clapboards), all his flock pitched in to take care of it.

Ian brought the three children, dressed in their oldest clothes. Thomas and Daphne loved Good Works but Agatha had to be talked into coming. At fifteen she was balky and resentful, given to fits of moody despair. Ian never could decide: should he force her to participate for her own good? Or would that just alienate her further? This morning, though, he’d had an easier time than usual. He suspected her of harboring a certain furtive interest in the details of Reverend Emmett’s private life.

The house was a one-story cottage, more gray than white, lying in a modest neighborhood east of York Road. By the time Ian and the children arrived, several members of the congregation were already setting out paint cans and brushes. Mrs. Jordan (Sister Jessie now, but Ian found it hard to switch) was spreading a drop-cloth over the boxwoods, and Reverend Emmett was perched on a ladder wire-brushing the porch overhang. Ian grabbed a ladder of his own and went to take the shutters down. Reverend Emmett’s mother came out in high heels and an aqua knit dress and asked if there was any little thing she could do, but they all said no. (What could they say? Her cardigan draped her shoulders so genteelly, with the sleeves turned back a precise two inches.)

Partway through the job, someone Ian didn’t know was sent to assist him. This was a cadaverously thin man in his thirties with a narrow ribbon of beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. Ian glanced at him curiously (their church didn’t see many guests), and the man said, “I’m Eli Everjohn. Bertha King’s son-in-law; we’re visiting from over Caro Mill.”

“Ian Bedloe,” Ian said.

He could see now who the man’s wife must be — the strawberry blonde who did resemble Sister Bertha, come to think of it, scraping clapboards with the children. She seemed much too pretty for such a knobby, gangling husband. This Eli handled tools at a remove. He handled his own hands at a remove, as if operating one of those claw arrangements where you try to scoop up prizes. His task was to take the hinges off the shutters and stow them in a bucket, which should have been easy enough; but the screwdriver seemed to confound him and he let it slip so many times that the screw heads were getting mangled. “Tell you what,” Ian said, setting down a shutter. “I’ll see to this and you can have my job.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that!” the man said. “I’m scared of heights.”

Heights? The highest shutter was eight feet off the ground. But Ian didn’t point that out.

Eli raised one arm to wipe his forehead, waving the screwdriver dangerously close to Ian’s face. “At my church, we don’t mess with such as this,” he said. “We visit door to door instead.”

“What church is that?”

“Holy House of the Gospel.”

“I guess I never heard of it.”

“We’re much stricter than you-all are,” Eli said. “We would never for instance let our women wear the raiment of men.”

Ian glanced at Eli’s wife. Sure enough, she wore a dress — a rosebudded, country-looking dress that was interfering seriously with her attempts to mount a step stool.

“We don’t play cards neither, nor dance, and we’re more mindful of the appearance of evil,” Eli said. “Why, yesterday my mother-in-law got a prescription filled at a pharmacy that sells liquor! Walked right into a place that sells liquor without a thought for how it might look! And you don’t have no missionary outreach, neither.”

Ian was starting to feel defensive. He said, “We believe our lives are our missionary outreach.”

“Now, that’s just selfish,” Eli said. “To look at someone living in the shadow of eternal damnation and not try and change his ways: that’s selfish.”

Ian spun on his heel and went to fetch another shutter.

When he came back, though, Eli resumed where he had left off. “And if we did mess with house painting, we’d have prayed beforehand,” he said. His screwdriver slashed uselessly across a screw. “We pray before each task. We believe that whatever work we undertake is God’s work; I am an arrow shot by God to do His handiwork.”

He did look something like an arrow: straight and smooth, a sharp cowlick sticking up on the crown of his head.

“What exactly is your work?” Ian asked him, hoping to change the subject.

“I’m a private detective.”

This was so unexpected that Ian laughed. Eli scowled. “What’s funny about that?” he said.

“Detective?” Ian said. “You mean, like solving murders and mysteries and such?”

“Well, it’s more like tailing husbands to motel rooms. But that’s the Lord’s business too! Believe me.”

“If you say so,” Ian told him.

“What do you do, brother?”

“I’m a carpenter,” Ian said.

“Our Savior was a carpenter.”

“Well, yes.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who said I was ashamed?”

“Those your kids you came with?”

“Yes.”

“You look kind of young to have kids that old.”

“Really I’m just their uncle,” Ian said. “My parents and I take care of them.”

“I would’ve thought you were nothing but a college boy.”

“No, no.”

“You married?”

“No.”

“A bachelor.”

“Well, yes. A … bachelor,” Ian said.

Eli bent over a hinge again. Ian watched for a minute and then turned back to his ladder.

But the next time he brought down a shutter, he said, “So you’ve never found a missing person, or anything like that.”

“Depends on what you call missing,” Eli said. “Sure, I’ve found a few husbands here and there. Usually they’re just staying with a girlfriend, though, that everybody except their wives knows the name and address of.”

“I see,” Ian said.

He leaned the shutter against a sawhorse. He studied it. Not looking at Eli, he said, “Say a person had been missing a long time. Five or six years, say. Maybe seven or eight. Would the trail be too cold for you to follow?”

“What? Naw,” Eli said. “Bound to be something he left behind. People are so messy. That’s been my experience. People leave so much litter wherever they go to.”

He rotated one forearm and examined the inside of his wrist. A dribble of dusty blood ran downward from his palm. “Somebody special you had in mind?” he asked.

“Not really,” Ian said.

He brushed a dead leaf from a louver. He cleared his throat. He said, “Those kids I’m taking care of: their father is missing, I guess you could say. The father of the older two.”

“Is that so,” Eli said. “Ducking his child support, huh?”

“Child support? Oh. Right,” Ian said.

“Boy, I hate those child-support guys,” Eli said. “Or, no, not hate. Forget hate. The Bible cautions us not to hate. But I … pity them, yes, I surely do pity those child-support guys. You’d never get me to raise one of them’s kids.”

“Oh, they’re really like my own now,” Ian said.

“Even so! Here you are sitting home with three young ones and he’s off enjoying his self.”

“I don’t mind,” Ian said.

He didn’t want to go into the whole story. In fact, he couldn’t remember now why he’d brought it up in the first place.

He was supervising the children’s homework at the kitchen table when he heard a wailing sound outdoors. He said, “Was that a baby?”

No one answered. They were too busy arguing. Thomas was telling Daphne that when he was in third grade, a plain old wooden pencil had been good enough for him. Daphne had no business, he said, swiping his personal ballpoint pen. Daphne said, “Maybe what you wrote in third grade wasn’t worth a pen.” Then Agatha complained they’d made her lose her train of thought. Thanks to them, she would have to start this whole equation over again.

“Was that a baby crying?” Ian asked.

They barely paused.

“Hey,” Thomas said to the others. “Want to hear something disgusting?”

“No, what?”

Ian crossed the kitchen and opened the screen door. It was light enough still so he could make out the clothesline poles and the azalea bushes, and the stockade fence that separated the backyard from the alley.

“In science class, my teacher? Mr. Pratt?” Thomas said. “He stands at the blackboard, he tells us, ‘By the time I’ve finished teaching this lesson, microscopic portions of my mouth will be all over this room.’ ”

“Eeuw!” Daphne and Agatha said.

Just inside the gate, which had not been completely closed in years, sat a minuscule patch of darkness, a denser black than the fence posts. This patch stirred and glinted in some way and uttered another thin wail.

“Kitty-kitty?” Ian called.

He stepped outside, shutting the screen door behind him. Yes, it was definitely a cat. When he approached, it teetered on the brink of leaving but finally stood its ground. He bent to pat its head. He could feel the narrow skull beneath fur so soft that it made almost no impression on his fingertips.

“Where’s your owner, little cat?” he asked.

But he thought he knew the answer to that. There wasn’t any tag or collar, and when he ran a hand down its body he could count the ribs. It staggered weakly beneath his touch, then braced itself and started purring in a rusty, unpracticed way, pressing its small face into the cup of his palm.

As it happened, the Bedloes had no pets at that particular moment. They had never replaced Beastie, and the latest of their cats had disappeared a few months ago. So this new little cat had come to the right people. Ian let it spend a few minutes getting used to him, and then he picked it up and carried it back inside the house. It clung to him with needle claws, tense but still conscientiously purring. “See what I found in the alley,” he told the children.

“Oh, look!” Daphne cried, slipping out of her chair. “Can I hold it, Ian? Can I keep it?”

“If no one comes to claim it,” Ian said, handing it over.

In the light he saw that the cat was black from head to foot, and not much more than half grown. Its eyes had changed to green already but its face was still the triangular, top-heavy face of a kitten. Thomas was lifting its spindly tail to see what sex it was, but the cat objected to that and climbed higher on Daphne’s shoulder. “Ouch!” Daphne squawked. “Thomas, quit! See what you made it do?”

“It’s a girl, I think,” Thomas announced.

“Leave her alone, Thomas!”

“She’s not just yours, Daphne,” Agatha said. She had risen too and was scratching the cat behind its ears.

“She is so mine! Ian said so! You’re mine, mine, mine, you little sweetums,” Daphne said, nuzzling the cat’s nose with her own. “Oh, what kind of monstrous, mean person would just ditch you and drive off?”

All of a sudden Ian had an image of Agatha, Thomas, and Daphne huddled in a ditch by the side of a road. They were hanging onto each other and their eyes were wide and fearful. And far in the distance, almost out of sight, Ian’s car was vanishing around a curve.

But then immediately afterward, he felt such a deep sense of loss that it made his breath catch.

His mother was truly disabled now. Oh, she still hobbled from room to room, she still insisted on standing over the stove and creeping behind the dust mop, but the arthritis had seized up her hands and the finer motions of day-to-day life were beyond her. Folding the laundry, driving the car, buttoning Daphne’s dress down the back — all that was left to Ian and his father. And Ian’s father was not much help. Any task he began seemed to end in, “How the dickens …?” and “Ian, can you come here a minute?” In the old days Claudia had stopped by once or twice a week to see what needed doing, but she had moved to Pittsburgh when Macy found a better job; and first they’d returned for holidays but now they didn’t even do that very often.

Meanwhile, these children were a full-time occupation. They were good children, bright children; they did well in school and never got in serious trouble. But even nonserious trouble could consume a great deal of energy, Ian had learned. Agatha, for instance, was suffering all the miseries of adolescence. Every morning she set off for school alone and friendless — the earnest, pale, studious kind of girl Ian had ignored when he himself was her age, but now he cursed those callow high-school kids who couldn’t see how special she was, how intelligent and witty and perceptive. Thomas, on the other hand, had too many friends. Tall and graceful, his voice already cracking and a shadow darkening his upper lip, he was more interested in socializing than in school-work, and one or another of the Bedloes was always having to attend parent-teacher conferences — most often Ian, it seemed.

As for Daphne, she wound through life sparkling at everyone and lowering her long black lashes over stunning blue-black eyes; but any time you crossed her there was hell to pay. She was fierce, that Daphne. “I think she had a difficult infancy,” Ian was always explaining. “She’s really a good kid, believe me. She just feels she’s got to fend for herself,” he told a teacher. Yet another teacher. At yet another parent-teacher conference. (His second of the year, and school had been in session only ten days.)

Cicely was living out in California now with a folk guitarist. Pig Benson’s family had moved away while he was in the army. Andrew was in graduate school at Tulane. And anyhow, the last time Andrew came home it turned out he and Ian didn’t have much to talk about. At one point Andrew had referred to the “goddamned holiday traffic,” and then reddened and said, “Sorry,” so Ian knew he’d heard about Second Chance from someone. And then Ian had to take Daphne for her booster shots, and that was that. Andrew had not suggested getting together again.

Bachelor. What a dashing word. Ian the bachelor. He would live in an apartment all his own. (A bachelor pad.) He’d have friends his own age dropping by to visit. Young women going out with him. And no one trailing behind to ask, “But how about us? Who will see to us? Who will find our socks for us and help with our history project?”

At work, he was putting the final touches on a drop-front desk. He was rubbing linseed oil into the wood, while Bert, one of the new men, worked on a bureau across the room.

Their kitchen-cabinet days were over, thank heaven. Now rich young couples from Bolton Hill showed up at Mr. Brant’s shop to commission one-of-a-kind furniture: bookcases custom-fitted to Bolton Hill’s high ceilings, stand-up desks made to measure, and Shaker-looking benches. Everything was built the old way, with splines and rabbets and lap joints, no nails, no stains or plastic finishes. Orders were backed up a year or more and they’d had to hire three new employees.

You’d think this would delight Mr. Brant, but he remained as morose as always. Or was that only his deafness? No, because whenever his wife dropped by — a much younger woman who’d been deaf from birth, unlike Mr. Brant — she would sign to him with flying fingers, her face lighting up and clouding over to go with what she said; and Ian could see she lived a life as full and talkative as any hearing person’s. Mr. Brant would watch her without altering his expression, and then he would make a few signs of his own — clumsy, blunt signs, stiff-thumbed. Ian wondered how on earth they had courted. What could Mr. Brant have said that would win such a woman’s heart? When Mrs. Brant watched his hands, her eyes grew very intent and focused and all the animation left her. Ian had the feeling her husband was somehow dampening her enthusiasm, but maybe it only seemed that way.

One of the new employees was Mrs. Brant’s niece, a rosy, bosomy girl named Jeannie who’d dropped out of college to do something more real. (They were seeing a lot of that nowadays.) Jeannie said Mrs. Brant was a regular social butterfly. She said Mrs. Brant had dozens of friends who’d gone to Gallaudet with her, and they would sit around her kitchen talking away a mile a minute, using their special sign language with lots of inside jokes and dirty words; but her husband had come late to sign and could barely manage such basics as “Serve supper” and “Mail letter” (like Tonto, Jeannie said), so of course he was left in the dust. He was neither fish nor fowl, Jeannie said. This made Ian feel fonder of the man. He had long ago given up all hope of befriending him, or of seeing any hint of emotion in that handsome, leathery face; but now he regretted dismissing him so easily. “He must be awfully lonesome,” he told Jeannie, “watching his wife enjoy herself with her friends.”

“Oh, he doesn’t care,” Jeannie said. “He just stomps off to his garden. None of us can figure why she married him. Maybe it was sex. I do think he’s kind of sexy, don’t you?”

Jeannie often talked that way. She made Ian feel uncomfortable. Several times she had suggested they go out together some evening, and although he did find her attractive, with her streaming hair and bouncy peasant blouses, he always gave some excuse.

This afternoon she was helping Bert with his bureau. (She didn’t know enough yet to be entrusted with a piece all her own.) Her job was to attach the drawer knobs — perfectly plain beechwood cylinders — but she kept leaving them to come over and talk to Ian. “Pretty,” she said of the desk. Then, without a pause, “You like nature, Ian?”

“Nature? Sure.”

“Me and some friends are taking a picnic lunch to Loch Raven this Sunday. Want to come?”

“Well, I have church on Sundays,” Ian told her.

“Church,” she said. She rocked back on the heels of her moccasins. “But how about after church?” she said. “We wouldn’t be leaving till one or so.”

“Oh, uh, there’s my nephew and nieces, too,” Ian said. “I sort of have to keep an eye on them on weekends.”

“Why can’t their parents do that?”

“Their parents are dead.”

“Their grandparents, then,” she said, instantly readjusting.

“My mother’s got arthritis and my dad is kind of tied up.”

“Or the other grandparents! Or other aunts and uncles! Or baby-sitters! Or can’t the older ones watch the younger ones? Or maybe you could call the mothers of some of their school friends and see if—”

“It’s kind of involved,” Ian said. He was surprised at the number of options that could be produced at such short notice. “I guess I’d just better say no,” he told her.

“Christ,” she said, “what a drag. Why, even chain gangs get their Sundays off.”

Then Mr. Brant called, “Jeannie!” He towered over the bureau, glaring in her direction, and she said, “Oops! Gotta go.”

She skipped away, a juicy morsel of a girl, and Ian noticed how her long hair swung against the tight-packed seat of her jeans.

He had made it up about the children, of course. They were well past the stage when they needed sitters. But somehow he began to believe his own alibi, and as he watched her he thought, Right! Even chain gangs, he thought, are allowed a little time to themselves.

Well, no one had ever said this would be easy.

But then why didn’t he feel forgiven? Why didn’t he, after all these years of penance, feel that God had forgiven him?

* * *

The little black cat settled in immediately. She was very polite and clean, with a smell like new woolen yarn, and she tolerated any amount of petting. Daphne named her Honeybunch. Thomas named her Alexandra. Any time one would call her, the other would call louder. “Here, Honeybunch.” “No, Alexandra! Here, Alexandra, you know who you love best.” Agatha stayed out of it. She was abstracted all that weekend, moping because a classmate had thrown a party without inviting her. The reason Ian knew this was that Thomas announced it, cruelly, during Saturday night supper. Agatha had told Thomas he was piggish to chew with his mouth open, and Thomas said, “Well, at least I don’t have to buy my clothes in the Chubbette department. At least I’m not so fat that Missy Perkins wouldn’t ask me to her slumber party!” Then Agatha threw down her napkin and bolted from the table, and Daphne said, in a satisfied tone, “You’re a meanie, Thomas.”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“She started it.”

“Did not.”

“Did so.”

“Quit that,” Ian said. “Both of you may be excused.”

“Why do I have to go when he’s the one who—”

“You’re excused, I said.”

They left, grumbling under their breaths as they moved into the living room.

Supper was more or less finished, anyhow. Ian’s father had already pushed away his plate and tilted back in his chair, and his mother was merely toying with her dessert. She hadn’t taken a bite in the last five minutes; she was deep in one of her blow-by-blow household sagas, and it seemed she would never get around to eating her last half-globe of canned peach.

“So there I was in the basement,” she said, “looking at all this water full of let’s-not-discuss-it, and the man pulled a kind of zippery tube from his machine and twined it down the …”

Ian started thinking about the comics. It was childish of him, he knew, but one thing he really enjoyed at the end of every day was reading “Peanuts” in the Evening Sun. It made a kind of oasis — that tiny, friendly world where everybody was so quaint and earnest and reflective. But what with Good Works, and the weekly grocery trip, and shopping for the kids’ new gym shoes, he hadn’t had a chance at the paper yet; and now he could hear the others mauling it in the living room. By the time he got hold of it all the pages would be disarranged and crumpled.

“The total bill came to sixty dollars,” his mother was saying. “I consider that cheap, in view of what the man had to deal with. When he was done he had me look down the floor drain. Big dark echoey floor drain. ‘Hear that?’ he said, and I said, ‘Hear what?’ He said, ‘All along the line, your neighbors flushing their toilets. First one here and then one far, far away over there,’ he said, ‘all connected by this network of pipes.’ ‘Well, fine,’ I said, ‘but left to my own devices I believe I could manage to live out my life not hearing, thank you very much.’ ”

In the living room, quarrelsome voices climbed over each other and Ian caught the sound of paper tearing. They were demolishing “Peanuts,” he was certain. He sighed.

Suppose, he thought suddenly, his boyhood self was to walk into the scene at this moment. Suppose he was offered a glimpse of how he had turned out: twenty-six years old and still living with his parents, tending someone else’s children, obsessed with the evening comics. Huh? he’d say. Why, what has happened here? What has become of me? How in heaven’s name did things ever get to this state?

“Give me one good reason I should have to go to church,” Agatha said on Sunday morning. “It’s hypocritical to go! I’m not a believer.”

“You can go to Grandma and Grandpa’s church if you prefer,” Ian told her.

“Listen carefully, Ian, I’ll only say this one more time: I am not a believer.”

He wrapped an elastic around Daphne’s pony tail. “How about this,” he said. “You attend till you’re eighteen, and then you stop. That way, I won’t have to feel guilty you didn’t get the proper foundation.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty even now,” Agatha told him. “I absolve you, Ian.”

He drew back slightly. Absolve?

“Maybe she could go to Mary McQueen,” Daphne suggested.

Agatha said, “Mary Our Queen is for Catholics, stupid.”

“Agatha, don’t call her stupid. Let’s get moving. Thomas is already downstairs.”

They descended to the living room. Daphne clattering in the patent leather Mary Janes she liked to wear to church. The sound of Sunday morning, Ian thought. He told his parents, “We’re off.”

“Oh, all right, dear,” his mother said. She and his father were reading the paper on the couch.

“Take that business of the fig tree,” Agatha said as she let the front door slam behind her. “Jesus cursing the fig tree.”

“Where’s Thomas?”

“Here I am,” Thomas said from the porch swing.

“Let’s go, then.”

“Jesus decides He wants figs,” Agatha said. “Of course, it’s not fig season, but Jesus wants figs anyhow. So up He walks to this fig tree, but naturally all He finds is leaves. And what does He do? Puts a curse on the poor little tree.”

“No!” Daphne breathed. Evidently she hadn’t heard about this before.

“Next thing you know, the tree’s withered and died.”

“No.”

Ian knew that Agatha was just passing through a stage, but even so he minded, a bit. Over the years he had come to view Jesus very personally. The most trite and sentimental Sunday School portrait could send a flash of feeling through him, as if Jesus were … oh, one of those older boys he used to admire when he was small, someone he’d watched from a distance and grown to know and love without ever daring to engage in conversation.

Also, Agatha was seeding doubts in the other two.

“Doesn’t that seem petty to you?” she was asking Daphne. “I mean, doesn’t it seem unreasonable? If we behaved like that, we’d be sent to our rooms to think it over.”

“Agatha,” Ian said, “there’s a great deal in the Bible that’s simply beyond our understanding.”

“Beyond yours, maybe,” Agatha said. She told Daphne, “Or Noah’s Ark: how about that? God kills off all the sinners in a mammoth rainstorm. ‘Gotcha!’ He says, and He’s enjoying it, you know He is, or otherwise He’d have sent a few sample rains ahead of time so they could mend their ways.”

Picture how they must look from outside, Ian thought. A cleaned and pressed little family walking together to church, discussing matters of theology. Perfect.

From outside.

“Or Abraham and Isaac. That one really ticks me off. God asks Abraham to kill his own son. And Abraham says, ‘Okay.’ Can you believe it? And then at the very last minute God says, ‘Only testing. Ha-ha.’ Boy, I’d like to know what Isaac thought. All the rest of his life, any time his father so much as looked in his direction Isaac would think—”

Ian said, “Agatha, it’s very bad manners to criticize other people’s religion.”

“It’s very bad manners to force your own religion on them, too,” Agatha told him. “Shoot, it’s very unconstitutional. To make me go to church when I don’t want to.”

“Well, you’re right,” Ian said.

“Huh?”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t have done it.”

By now, they had stopped walking. Agatha peered at him. She said, “So can I leave now?”

“You can leave.”

She stood there a moment longer. The other two watched with interest. “Okay,” she said finally. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

She turned and set off toward home.

But without her it seemed so quiet. He missed her firm, opinionated voice and that little trick she had of varying her tone to quote each person’s remarks. No matter how imaginary those remarks might be.

“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,” Reverend Emmett read from Exodus, and Ian could almost hear Agatha beside him: “Any time we act jealous, people have a fit.” He shook the thought away. He bowed lower in his seat, propping his forehead on two fingers. Next to him, Daphne tore a tiny corner off a page of her hymnal and placed it on her tongue. Thomas was sitting behind them with Kenny Larson and his family. A fly was crawling up the front counter.

Reverend Emmett called for a hymn: “Blessed Assurance.” The congregation rose to sing, standing shoulder to shoulder. Everyone here was familiar to Ian. Or at least, semifamiliar. (Eli Everjohn and his wife were sitting with Sister Bertha, and Mrs. Jordan had brought her cousin.) “This is my story,” they sang, “this is my song …” Ian put an arm around Daphne and she nestled against him as she sang, her voice incongruously husky for such a little girl.

The sermon was on the Sugar Rule. Recently a committee had approached Reverend Emmett suggesting that the rule be dropped. It was just so complicated, they said. Face it, they were eating sugar every day of their lives, one way or another. Even peanut butter contained sugar if you bought it from a supermarket. Reverend Emmett had told them he would meditate on the issue and report his conclusions. What he said this morning — pacing behind the counter, running his long fingers through his forelock — was that the Sugar Rule was supposed to be complicated. “Like error itself,” he said, “sugar creeps in the cracks. You tell yourself you didn’t realize, you were subject to circumstance, you forgot to read the list of ingredients and anyhow, it’s everywhere and it can’t be helped. Isn’t that significant? It’s not that you’ll be damned forever if you take a grain of sugar; nobody says that. Sugar is merely a distraction, not a sin. But I feel it’s important to keep the rule because of what it stands for: the need for eternal watchfulness.”

The children — those who were listening — sent each other disappointed grimaces, but Ian didn’t really care that much. The Sugar Rule was a minor inconvenience, at most. So was the Coffee Rule; so was the Alcohol Rule. The difficult one was the Unmarried Sex Rule. “How can something be right one day and wrong the next?” Cicely had asked him. “And what’s done is done, anyway, and can’t be undone, right?”

He had said, “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be able to go on living.” Then he’d told her he wanted them to get married.

“Married!” Cicely had cried. “Married, at our age! I haven’t seen the world yet! I haven’t had any fun!”

He covered his eyes with his hand.

In his daydreams, he walked into services one morning and found a lovely, golden-haired girl sitting in the row just ahead. She would be so intent on the sermon that she wouldn’t even look his way; she had grown up in a religion very much like this one, it turned out, and believed with all her heart. After the Benediction Ian introduced himself, and she looked shy and pleased. They had the most proper courtship, but he could tell she felt the same way he did. They would marry at Second Chance with Reverend Emmett officiating. She would love the three children as much as if they were hers and stay home forever after to tend them. The Church Maiden, Ian called her in his mind. He never entered this building without scanning the rows for the Church Maiden.

After the sermon came Amending. “Does somebody want to stand up?” Reverend Emmett asked. But standing up was for serious sins, where you confessed to the whole congregation and discussed in public all possible methods of atonement. Evidently none of them had strayed so grievously during this past week. “Well, then,” Reverend Emmett said, smiling, “we’ll amend in private,” and they bowed their heads and whispered their mistakes to themselves. Ian caught snatches of “lied to my husband” and “slapped my daughter” and “drank part of a beer with my boss.” “Thursday I stole my sister’s new bra and wore it to gym class,” Daphne said, startling Ian, but of course he should not have been listening. He averted his face from her and whispered, “I was snappish with the children three different times. Four. And I told Mr. Brant I was sick with the flu when really I just wanted a day off.”

Unlike the other denominations Ian knew of, this one had nothing against sinning in your thoughts. To think a sinful thought and not act upon it was to practice righteousness, Reverend Emmett said — almost as much righteousness as not thinking the thought in the first place. Jesus must have been misquoted on that business about committing adultery in your heart. So Ian left unspoken what troubled him the most:

I’ve been atoning and atoning, and sometimes lately I’ve hated God for taking so long to forgive me. Some days I feel I’m speaking into a dead telephone. My words are knocking against a blank wall. Nothing comes back to show I’ve been heard.

“Let it vanish now from our souls, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen,” Reverend Emmett said. He looked radiant. Whatever had weighed on his own soul (for his lips had moved with the others’, this morning) had obviously been lifted from him.

They sang “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” in a tone that struck Ian as lingering and regretful. Then Reverend Emmett gave the Benediction, and they were free to go. Daphne shot off to join a friend. Ian wove his way through the other members’ greetings. He answered several inquiries about his mother’s arthritis, and politely refused Mrs. Jordan’s offer of a ride home. (She drove like a maniac.) Near the door, Eli Everjohn stood awkwardly by in a brilliant blue suit while his wife talked with Sister Myra. “Morning, Brother Eli,” Ian said. He started to edge past him, but Eli, who must have been feeling left out, brightened and said, “Why, hey there! Hey!”

“Enjoy the service?” Ian asked.

“Oh, I’m sure your pastor means well,” Eli said. “But forbidding ordinary white sugar, and then allowing your young folks to listen to rock-and-roll music! Seems like to me he’s got his priorities mixed up. I don’t know that I hold with this Amending business, either. Awful close to Roman Catholic, if you ask me.”

“Ah, well, it’s a matter of opinion, I guess.”

“No, Brother Ian, it is not a matter of opinion. Goodness! What a notion.”

That more or less finished the conversation, Ian figured. He gave up and raised a hand amiably in farewell. But then he paused and turned back. “Brother Eli?” he said. “I wonder. Do you think you could locate a missing person for me?”

“Why, I’ll do my best,” Eli told him.

He didn’t seem at all surprised by the question. It was Ian who was surprised.

“His name was Tom Dean,” he told Eli. “Thomas Dean, Senior. He was married to my sister-in-law before she married my brother, and he’s the only one who might be able to tell us who my sister-in-law’s family was.”

He and Eli sat on the couch in Sister Bertha’s living room. No doubt Sister Bertha was wondering what business Ian could possibly have here, but she stayed out of sight, ostentatiously rattling pans in the kitchen and talking to her daughter. Her house was a ranch house with rooms that all flowed together, and Ian distinctly heard her discussing someone named Netta who had suffered a terrible grease fire.

“I don’t know where Tom Dean grew up,” Ian said, “but sometime in the spring of ‘sixty-five he wrote to Lucy from Cheyenne, Wyoming. Or maybe he phoned; I’m not sure. Somehow he got in touch, asking her to send him his things.”

“How long had they been divorced?” Eli said.

“I don’t know. The kids were still small, though. It can’t have been too long.”

“And what state was this divorce granted in? Maryland? Wyoming? What state of the Union?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Eli surveyed him mournfully. He had taken off his suit coat and the armpits of his white shirt showed a faint bluish tinge.

“It was only mentioned in passing,” Ian said. “You don’t discuss your divorce in detail with the family of your new husband. So when my brother died, and then Lucy died, there was no one we could ask. She had left behind the three children and we were hoping some of her relatives could take them, but we didn’t know if she had any relatives. We didn’t even know her maiden name.”

Beyond the plate glass window, Sunday traffic swished along Lake Avenue. Sister Bertha said Netta had escaped unburned and so had her husband and baby and her dear, darling, wonderful, incredible little dog.

“Still,” Eli said, “your sister-in-law must have had some kind of document. Some certificate or something, somewhere among her papers.”

“She didn’t leave any papers. After she died my dad went through her house and he couldn’t find a one.”

“How about her billfold? Driver’s license?”

“She didn’t drive.”

“Social security card?”

“For Lucy Dean. Period.”

“Photos, then. Any photos?”

“None.”

“Your family must have photos, though. From after she married your brother.”

“We do, but my mother put them away so as not to remind the children.”

“Not to remind them? Well, land sakes.”

“My mother’s kind of … she prefers to look on the bright side. But I can find them for you, I’m sure.”

“Maybe later on,” Eli said. “Okay: let’s talk about your sister-in-law’s friends. You recall if she had any girlfriends?”

“Not close ones,” Ian said. “Just a couple of women she waitressed with, back before she married Danny. One of them we never tracked down, and the other my mother ran into a year or so after Lucy died but she said she really didn’t know a thing about her.”

“Didn’t no one ever ask this Lucy anything?”

“It does sound peculiar,” Ian said. This was the first time he’d realized exactly how peculiar. He was amazed that they could have been so unaware, so incurious, living all those months alongside another human being.

Eli said, “Tell what was in her desk.”

“She didn’t have a desk.”

“Her topmost bureau drawer, then. Or that ragtag drawer full of string and such in her kitchen.”

“All I know is, my dad went through her house and he didn’t find anything useful. He talked about how people don’t write letters anymore.”

“So: no letters.”

“And no address book, either. I remember he mentioned that.”

“How about her divorce papers? She couldn’t have throwed them away.”

“Maybe after she remarried she did.”

“Well, then, her marriage certificate. Her marriage to your brother.”

“Nope.”

“You know she would’ve kept that.”

“All I can say is, we didn’t find it.”

“She must’ve had a safe deposit box.”

“Lucy? I doubt it. And where was the key, then?”

“So you are trying to tell me,” Eli said, “that a person manages to get through life without a single solitary piece of paper in her possession.”

“Well, I realize it’s unusual—”

“It’s impossible!”

“Well …”

“Had her place been burglarized recently? Did the drawers look like they’d been rifled?”

“Not that I heard of,” Ian said.

“Was anybody else living in the house with her?”

“No …”

But a dim uneasiness flitted past him, like something you see and yet don’t see out of the corner of your eye.

“Anyone suspicious hanging about her?”

“No, no …”

But wary, suspicious Agatha pushed into his mind — her closed-off face with the puffy lids that veiled her secret thoughts.

“Now, I don’t want you to take this wrong,” Eli said, “but you are about the most unhelpful client I ever had to deal with.”

“I realize that. I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I shouldn’t have wasted your time.”

Eli shook his head, and his cowlick waggled and dipped. God’s arrow with no place to go, Ian couldn’t help thinking.

Monday noon, he told Mr. Brant he was eating at home today. He drove home and let himself into the house, announcing, “It’s me! Forgot my billfold!”

“Oh, hello, dear,” his mother called from the kitchen. Then she and his father went on talking, no doubt over their usual lunch of tinned soup and saltine crackers.

He climbed to the second floor and onward, more stealthily, to the attic, to Daphne and Agatha’s little room underneath the eaves.

Girls tended to be messier than boys, he thought. (He had noticed that in his college days.) Agatha’s bed was heaped with so many books that he wondered how she slept, and Daphne’s was a jungle of stuffed animals. He went over to Agatha’s bureau, a darkly varnished highboy that had to stand away from the wall a bit so as not to hit the eaves. The top was littered with pencil stubs and used Kleenexes and more books, but the drawers were fairly well organized. He patted each one’s contents lightly, alert for something that didn’t belong — the rustle of paper or a hard-edged address book. But there was nothing.

He knelt and looked under her bed. Dust balls. He lifted the mattress. Candy-bar wrappers. He shook his head and let the mattress drop. He tried the old fiber-board wardrobe standing at one end of the room and found a rod of clothes, half Daphne’s and half Agatha’s, packed too tightly together. Shoes and more shoes lay tangled underneath.

He bent to poke his head inside the storage room that ran under the eaves. In the dimness he made out a dress form, a lampshade, two foot lockers, and a cardboard carton. He crawled further inside and lifted one of the carton’s flaps. The musty gray smell reminded him of mice. He dragged the carton toward the door for a closer look: his mother’s framed college diploma, a bundle of letters addressed to Miss Beatrice Craig … He pushed the carton toward the rear again.

Turning to go, he saw a faded, fabric-covered box on the floor — the kind that stationery sometimes comes in. He flipped up the lid and found a clutter of barrettes and hair ribbons and junk jewelry. Agatha’s, no doubt. He let the lid fall shut and crawled on out.

In the bedroom, he paused. He reached back and pulled open the drawer in the box’s base.

Right away, he knew he’d hit on something. The contents were so tidy: flattened papers stacked in order of size, and on top of them a few pieces of jewelry, no less junky than those in the main compartment but obviously dating from an earlier time. He pushed the jewelry aside and removed the papers.

A savings booklet from Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust, showing a balance of $123.08. The title to a Chevrolet owned by Daniel C. Bedloe. A receipt from Morehead TV Repair guaranteeing all replacement parts for thirty days. A marriage certificate for Daniel Craig Bedloe and Lucy Ann Dean. (Ian paused a moment over that one. Was there any remote possibility that Ann could be a last name?) A birth certificate for Daphne Marie Bedloe. A pamphlet of instructions for filing health insurance claims. A birth certificate for Agatha Lynn Dulsimore and then one for Thomas. A receipt for—

Agatha who?

Agatha Lynn Dulsimore, born April 4, 1959. Father’s full name: Thomas Robert Dulsimore. Mother’s maiden name: Lucy Ann Dean. And Thomas Robert Dulsimore, Junior; same parents.

Why, Dean was not Lucy’s married name but her maiden name. She must have changed back to Dean after the divorce, and changed her children’s names too — at least by implication. All this time, the Bedloes had been hunting a man who didn’t exist.

Ian sifted through the few remaining papers — a hazy, unflattering photo of Lucy and the older two children, an auto insurance policy, a recipe for banana bread — but the birth certificates were the only items that told him anything. Both listed the parents’ home address as Portia, Maryland. Both carried definite dates, and a doctor’s name, and a hospital’s name in a town called Marcy, which if Ian recollected right lay not far from Portia, just below the Pennsylvania line. He had enough to track a man down by, provided a person was halfway skilled at tracking.

He slipped the papers inside his shirt and went off to see Eli Everjohn.

“Have some mashed potato. Honeybunch,” Daphne said. She held her spoon out to the little cat, who was sitting on Daphne’s lap with her front paws folded primly beneath her. First the cat peered into Daphne’s eyes, as if checking to make sure she really meant it, and then she leaned forward and lapped daintily. When she was finished, the spoon gleamed. She sat up to wash her face. “Good girl,” Daphne said, and she dipped the spoon back in her plate and took a mouthful for herself.

“Ooh, revolting!” Agatha said. “Ian, did you see what she did?”

“What? What’d I do?” Daphne asked.

“You ate from a spoon the cat licked!”

At the other end of the table, Thomas gave an elderly cough. “Well, actually,” he said, “the cat’s the one who should worry. Mr. Pratt says human spit carries more germs than any other animal’s, because humans have these fingers they keep putting in their mouths.”

Ian laughed. The others looked at him.

“I was just, ah, thinking,” he told them.

They looked away again.

You could never call it a penance, to have to take care of these three. They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and … well, life.

What he would do was, once he got Eli’s report he would file it in a drawer someplace. Then when they grew up and started wondering about their origins he would hand it over to them; that was all. He would certainly not use the information himself in any way.

People needed to know their genetic backgrounds — what diseases ran in their families and so forth. Also this would help him apply for guardianship. Social Security. That sort of thing.

He rose and started clearing the table. It was a relief to have all that settled. He was glad he hadn’t told anyone what he was doing.

But at work the next day, he did tell someone. He told Jeannie. He was teaching her how to select the right grain of wood and she asked if he’d like to go to a movie that night at the Charles. “I can’t,” he said.

“What, are movies against your religion?”

“No, it’s my turn to car-pool for Brownies.”

“Hey,” she said. “Ian. How long you going to go on living like this, anyway?”

So he told her about Eli. He didn’t know why, exactly. It wasn’t as if finding Thomas Dulsimore would change his situation. Maybe he just hoped to prove he wasn’t as passive as she supposed. And she did seem gratifyingly interested. When he mentioned the stationery box she said, “Naw! Go on!” She asked, “What-all was in it?” and she even wanted to know about the jewelry.

“It wasn’t the kind of jewelry that would give you any clues,” he said. “I honestly didn’t pay much attention.”

“And the photo?”

“Oh, well, that was … well, the detective was glad to see it, of course, so’s he’d know more or less what she looked like, but it didn’t show a street sign or a license plate or anything like that. Just Lucy.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

For some reason, he didn’t want to tell her how pretty.

Lucy’s image swam into his mind — not the real-life version but the version in the snapshot: out of focus, too young, still unformed, nowhere near as finely chiseled as she had seemed later. One hip was slung out gracelessly to support Thomas’s weight, and one hand was reaching blurrily to gather Agatha closer. Against all logic (he knew he was being ridiculous), he started resenting Agatha’s disloyalty in keeping her mother’s likeness. There you are: you give up school, you sacrifice everything for these children, and what do they do? They secretly hoard their mother’s photo and cling to her and prefer her. She hadn’t even taken proper care of them, willfully dying and leaving them as she did; but evidently blood motherhood won over everything.

Jeannie said, “I’m really glad to hear you’re doing this, Ian.”

“Well, it’s only so we can get straight,” he told her. “I certainly don’t plan to hand the three of them over to strangers or anything like that.”

“What are you, crazy?” she asked. “You’ve got a life to live! You can’t drag them around with you forever.”

“But I’m responsible for them. I worry I’d be, um, sinning, so to speak, to walk away from them.”

“You want to know what I think?” Jeannie asked. She leaned forward. Her face seemed sharper now, more pointed. The hollow between her collarbones could have held a teaspoon of salt. “I think you’re sinning not to walk away,” she said.

“How do you figure that?”

“I think we’re each allowed one single life to live on this planet. We’ll never get another chance in all eternity,” she said. “And if you let it go to waste — now, that is sinning.”

“Yes,” he said, “but what if I’m honor bound to waste it? What if I have an obligation?”

He worried she would make him explain, but she was too caught up in proving her point. “Even then!” she said triumphantly. “You put your regrets behind you. You move on past them. You do not commit the sin of squandering your only life.”

“Well, it sounds good,” he said.

It did sound good. He really had no argument to offer against it.

At Prayer Meeting the following night he looked for Eli Everjohn but didn’t find him, or the strawberry blonde either. He spotted Sister Bertha’s dark red pompadour and he sat down next to her and asked, “Where’s your daughter this evening?”

“She went home.”

“Home?”

“Her and Eli both, home to Caro Mill. Eli said to give you a message, though. What was it now he said? He said not to think you had slipped his mind and he would be in touch.”

“Thanks,” Ian told her.

Then Reverend Emmett announced the opening hymn: “Work for the Night Is Coming.”

Every time Ian attended Prayer Meeting, he thought of his first visit here. He remembered how he had felt welcomed by the loving voices of the singers; he remembered the sensation of prayers flowing heavenward. Coming here had saved him, he knew. Without the Church of the Second Chance he would have struggled alone forever, sunk in hopelessness.

So when Prayer Meeting seemed long-winded or inconsequential, when the petitions had to do with minor health complaints and personal disputes, he controlled his impatience. Tonight he prayed for Brother Kenneth’s colon to grow less irritable, for Sister Myra’s husband to appreciate her more fully. He listened to a recitation from Sister Nell that seemed not so much a request for prayers as an autobiography. “I learned to stop blaming myself for everything that went wrong,” one of her paragraphs went. “I had all the time been blaming myself. But really, you know, when you think about it, mostly it’s other people to blame, the godless and the self-centered, and so I said to this gal on my shift, I said, ‘Now listen here, Miss Maggie. You may think I was the one in charge of the …’ ”

Till Reverend Emmett broke in. “Ah, Sister Nell?”

“What?”

“What would you like us to pray for, exactly?”

“Pray for me to have strength,” she said, “in the face of fools and sinners.”

Ian prayed for Sister Nell to have strength.

The closing hymn was “Softly and Tenderly,” and when they sang, “Come home! Come home!” Ian felt he was the one they were calling.

“Go ye now into the world and bear witness to His teachings,” Reverend Emmett said, raising his arms. Almost before his “Amen,” people were stirring and preparing to leave. Several spoke to Ian as they passed. “Good to see you, Brother Ian.” “How’re the kids?” “Coming to paint with us Saturday?” They filed out. Ian hung behind.

Often it seemed to him that this room itself was his source of peace. Even the flicker of the fluorescent lights heartened him, and the faint chemical smell left over from when the place had been a dry cleaner’s. He found reasons to loiter, first collecting the hymn pamphlets and then stacking them just so on the counter. He paused at the edges of a conversation between Reverend Emmett and Brother Kenneth, who was offering further details about his colon. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and carefully buttoned his cuffs before, at long last, stepping out the door.

Then behind him, Reverend Emmett said, “Brother Ian? Mind if I walk partway with you?”

Ian felt his shoulders loosen. Possibly, this was what he’d been hoping for all along.

They walked north on York Road through a summer-like night, Reverend Emmett swinging his Bible. He was taller than Ian and took longer strides, although he kept trying to slow down. Occasionally he hummed a few notes beneath his breath—“Softly and Tenderly” again. Ian thought of an evening back in his Boy Scout days, when the scoutmaster (a young, athletic man, a former basketball star) had given him a ride home, filling him with a mixture of joy and self-consciousness. He knew Reverend Emmett merely acted as God’s steward, and that for someone who was the church’s founder and its sole leader he seemed remarkably unimpressed with his own importance. Still, Ian always felt tongue-tied around him. Tonight he considered discussing the weather but decided that was too mundane, and then when the silence stretched on too long he wished he had discussed the weather, but if he brought it up now it would seem strained. So he kept quiet, and it was Reverend Emmett who finally spoke.

“Some Prayer Meetings,” he said, “are like cleaning out a closet. Clearing away the dribs and drabs. Necessary, but tedious.”

And Ian said, as if making a perfectly apt response: “Is there such a thing as the Devil?”

Reverend Emmett glanced over at him.

“I mean,” Ian said, “does someone exist whose purpose is to tempt people into evil? To make them feel torn one way and another so they’re not sure which way is right anymore?”

“What is it you’re tempted to do, Brother Ian?” Reverend Emmett asked.

Ian swallowed. “I’m wasting my life,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

He must have mumbled the words. He raised his chin and said, almost shouting, “I’m wasting the only life I have! I have one single life in this universe and I’m not using it!”

“Well, of course you’re using it,” Reverend Emmett said calmly.

“I am?”

“This is your life,” Reverend Emmett said.

They faced each other at an intersection. A woman swerved around them.

“Lean into it, Ian,” Reverend Emmett said. Not “Brother Ian,” but “Ian.” It made what he said sound more direct, more oracular. He said, “View your burden as a gift. It’s the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that, and lean into it. This is the only life you’ll have.”

Then he clapped Ian on the shoulder, and turned away to cross York Road.

Ian resumed walking. For a while he pondered Reverend Emmett’s message, but he didn’t find it much help. To tell the truth, the man had disappointed him. And besides, he hadn’t answered Ian’s question. The question was: Is there such a thing as the Devil?

Ian had been referring to Jeannie, of course — Jeannie sitting forward compellingly, the hollow deepening at the base of her throat as she tempted him from his path. But the face that came to his mind at this moment was not Jeannie’s. It was Lucy’s. It was the tiny, perfect, heart-shaped face of Lucy Dean.

“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.”

Mrs. Millet stubbed out her cigarette and sat staring into space. Over the stove, a plastic clock in the shape of a cat ticked its long striped tail back and forth.

“It was the winter of ’sixty-seven he had the accident,” she said. “Motorcycling on icy roads. His wife called me up and told me. I will never hear the phone ring again as long as I live without going all over cold and sick.”

Ian said, “Well, I’m sorry.”

But it was only the most detached and courteous kind of sorry. He would never have left the children with such a man, even if the man had been willing.

“Of course, that second wife was pretty no-account herself,” Mrs. Millet said.

Ian stood up. (No use staying on for more of this.) He said, “Mrs. Millet, I appreciate your talking to me. I guess what you’re saying is, there was only that one aunt.”

“That’s all as I ever heard of,” she said.

“And no brothers or sisters, or cousins, or anything like that.”

“Not as I know of. Chances are the aunt has passed on too, by this time. Lord, lately it seems the whole world has passed on.”

It did seem that way, at times. At times, it really did.

At Prayer Meeting the ghostly smell of dry-cleaning fluid mingled with Mrs. Jordan’s cologne. “Pray for me to accept this cross without complaint,” Sister Myra said. Accept what cross? Ian hadn’t been listening. He bowed his head and felt the silence wrap around him like a clean, cool sheet that you reach for in your sleep halfway through a hot night.

“For our Sister Myra,” Reverend Emmett said at last.

“Amen.”

“Any other prayers, any other prayers …”

In a row toward the rear, Sister Bertha stood up. “I am troubled in my heart for another person tonight,” she said. She spoke pointedly to the empty chair in front of her. “I know of someone here who seems to be experiencing a serious difficulty. I was waiting to see if he’d ask for our prayers but so far he hasn’t.”

He? There were only three men present: Reverend Emmett, Brother Kenneth, and Ian.

“I know,” Sister Bertha said, “that this person must be feeling very overworked, very beset with problems, and he’s casting about for a solution. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him that he could bring it up at Prayer Meeting.”

She sat down.

Ian’s cheeks felt hot.

Surely private detectives were sworn to secrecy, weren’t they? Just like lawyers, or doctors. Weren’t they?

Reverend Emmett looked uncertain. He said, “Well …” and glanced around at the other worshipers. His eyes did not linger noticeably on Ian, although of course he must suspect. “Does this person wish to ask for our prayers?” he said.

No response. Just a few rustles and whispers.

“In that case,” Reverend Emmett said, “we won’t intrude. Let us pray, instead, for all of us. For all of us to know that we can bring our problems to God whenever we feel ready to let go of them.”

He raised his arms and the silence fell, as if he had somehow cast it forth in front of him.

Sister Bertha is a nosy-bones, Ian thought distinctly. And I hate that tomato-soup color she dyes her hair.

After the Benediction, he was the first one out the door. He left behind even Mrs. Jordan, who most likely would want to walk home with him, and he set off at a brisk, angry pace. So the last thing he expected to hear was Reverend Emmett calling his name. “Brother Ian!”

Ian stopped and turned.

The man must have run the whole way. He must have left his flock unattended, his Bible open on the counter, his church lit up and unlocked. But he wasn’t even breathing hard. He approached at a saunter, seemingly absorbed in slipping on a cardigan the same color as the dusk.

“May I tag along?” he asked.

Ian shrugged.

They set off together more slowly.

“Of course, it does come down to whether a person feels ready to let go,” Reverend Emmett said in the most conversational tone.

Ian kicked a Dixie cup out of his path.

“Some people prefer to hug their problems to themselves,” Reverend Emmett said.

Ian wheeled on him, clenching his fists in his pockets. He said, “This is my life? This is all I get? It’s so settled! It’s so cut and dried! After this there’s no changing! I just lean into the burden of those children forever, is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” Reverend Emmett told him.

“You said that! You said to lean into my burden!”

“But those children will be grown in no time,” Reverend Emmett said. “They are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness.”

“Okay,” Ian said. “Fine. How much longer till I’m forgiven?”

“No, no. The burden is that you must forgive.”

“Me?” Ian said. He stared at Reverend Emmett. “Forgive who?”

“Why, your brother and his wife, of course.”

Ian said nothing.

Finally Reverend Emmett asked, “Shall we walk on?”

So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow — not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.