The Accidental Tourist

it turned serious. Here I’ve got this little boy now, this great big seven-year-old boy with his clompy leather shoes, and it wasn’t playing house after all. It was for real, all along, and we just didn’t know it.”

She sat on the couch and raised one foot in front of her. She turned it admiringly this way and that. Her stockings bagged at the ankle.

“What is Edward up to?” she asked.

Macon said, “He’s still lying down.”

“Pretty soon he’ll do that for three hours straight.”

“Three hours?”

“Easy.”

“Isn’t that sort of cruel?”

“I thought you promised not to talk like that,” she told him.

“Right. Sorry,” Macon said.

“Maybe tomorrow he’ll lie down on his own.”

“You think so?”

“If you practice. If you don’t give in. If you don’t go all soft-hearted.”

Then she stood up and came over to Macon. She patted his arm. “But never mind,” she told him, “I think soft-hearted men are sweet.”

Macon backed away. He just missed stepping on Edward.

It was getting close to Thanksgiving, and the Learys were debating as usual about Thanksgiving dinner. The fact was, none of them cared for turkey. Still, Rose said, it didn’t seem right to serve anything else. It would just feel wrong. Her brothers pointed out that she’d have to wake up at five a.m. to put a turkey in the oven. But it was she who’d be doing it, Rose said. It wouldn’t be troubling them any.

Then it began to seem she had had an ulterior motive, for as soon as they settled on turkey she announced that she might just invite Julian Edge. Poor Julian, she said, had no close family nearby, and he and his neighbors gathered forlornly at holidays, each bringing his or her specialty. Thanksgiving dinner last year had been a vegetarian pasta casserole and goat cheese on grape leaves and kiwi tarts. The least she could do was offer him a normal family dinner.

“What!” Macon said, acting surprised and disapproving, but unfortunately, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. Oh, Julian was up to something, all right. But what could it be? Whenever Rose came down the stairs in her best dress and two spots of rouge, whenever she asked Macon to shut Edward in the pantry because Julian would be stopping by to take her this place or that — well, Macon had a very strong urge to let Edward accidentally break loose. He made a point of meeting Julian at the door, eyeing him for a long, silent moment before calling Rose. But Julian behaved; no glint of irony betrayed him. He was respectful with Rose, almost shy, and hovered clumsily when he ushered her out the door. Or was that the irony? His Rose Leary act. Macon didn’t like the looks of this.

Then it turned out that Porter’s children would be coming for Thanksgiving too. They usually came at Christmas instead, but wanted to trade off this year due to some complication with their grandparents on their stepfather’s side. So really, Rose said, wasn’t it good they were having turkey? Children were such traditionalists. She set to work baking pumpkin pies. “We gather together,” she sang, “to ask the Lord’s blessing…” Macon looked up from the sheaf of stolen menus he was spreading across the kitchen table. There was a note of gaiety in her voice that made him uneasy. He wondered if she had any mistaken ideas about Julian — if, for instance, she hoped for some kind of romance. But Rose was so plain and sensible in her long white apron. She reminded him of Emily Dickinson; hadn’t Emily Dickinson also baked for her nieces and nephews? Surely there was no need for concern.

“My son’s name is Alexander,” Muriel said. “Did I tell you that? I named him Alexander because I thought it sounded high-class. He was never an easy baby. For starters something went wrong while I was carrying him and they had to do a Caesarean and take him out early and I got all these complications and can’t ever have any more children. And then Alexander was so teeny he didn’t even look like a human, more like a big-headed newborn kitten, and he had to stay in an incubator forever, just about, and nearly died. Norman said, ‘When’s it going to look like other babies?’ He always called Alexander ‘it.’ I adjusted better; I mean pretty soon it seemed to me that that was what a baby ought to look like, and I hung around the hospital nursery but Norman wouldn’t go near him, he said it made him too nervous.”

Edward whimpered. He was just barely lying down — his haunches braced, his claws digging into the carpet. But Muriel gave no sign she had noticed.

“Maybe you and Alexander should get together some time,” she told Macon.

“Oh, I, ah…” Macon said.

“He doesn’t have enough men in his life.”

“Well, but—”

“He’s supposed to see men a lot; it’s supposed to show him how to act. Maybe the three of us could go to a movie. Don’t you ever go to movies?”

“No, I don’t,” Macon said truthfully. “I haven’t been to a movie in months. I really don’t care for movies. They make everything seem so close up.”

“Or just out to a McDonald’s, maybe.”

“I don’t think so,” Macon said.

Porter’s children arrived the evening before Thanksgiving, traveling by car because Danny, the oldest, had just got his driver’s license. That worried Porter considerably. He paced the floor from the first moment they could be expected. “I don’t know where June’s brain is,” he said. “Letting a sixteen-year-old boy drive all the way from Washington the first week he has his license! With his two little sisters in the car! I don’t know how her mind works.”

To make it worse, the children were almost an hour late. When Porter finally saw their headlights, he rushed out the door and down the steps well ahead of the others. “What kept you?” he cried.

Danny unfurled himself from the car with exaggerated nonchalance, yawning and stretching, and shook Porter’s hand as a kind of afterthought while turning to study his tires. He was as tall as Porter now but very thin, with his mother’s dark coloring. Behind him came Susan, fourteen — just a few months older than Ethan would have been. It was lucky she was so different from Ethan, with her cap of black curls and her rosy cheeks. This evening she wore jeans and hiking boots and one of those thick down jackets that made young people look so bulky and graceless. Then last came Liberty. What a name, Macon always thought. It was an invention of her mother’s — a flighty woman who had run away from Porter with a hippie stereo salesman eight and a half years ago and discovered immediately afterward that she was two months pregnant. Ironically, Liberty was the one who looked most like Porter. She had fair, straight hair and a chiseled face and she was dressed in a little tailored coat. “Danny got lost,” she said severely. “What a dummy.” She kissed Porter and her aunt and uncles, but Susan wandered past them in a way that let everyone know she had outgrown all that.

“Oh, isn’t this nice?” Rose said. “Aren’t we going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving?” She stood on the sidewalk wrapping her hand in her apron, perhaps to stop herself from reaching out to Danny as he slouched toward the house. It was dusk, and Macon, happening to glance around, saw the grown-ups as pale gray wraiths — four middle-aged unmarried relatives yearning after the young folks.

For supper they had carry-out pizza, intended to please the children, but Macon kept smelling turkey. He thought at first it was his imagination. Then he noticed Danny sniffing the air. “Turkey? Already?” Danny asked his aunt.

“I’m trying this new method,” she said. “It’s supposed to save energy. You set your oven extremely low and cook your meat all night.”

“Weird.”

After supper they watched TV — the children had never seemed to warm to cards — and then they went to bed. But in the middle of the night, Macon woke with a start and gave serious thought to that turkey. She was cooking it till tomorrow? At an extremely low temperature? What temperature was that, exactly?

He was sleeping in his old room, now that his leg had mended. Eventually he nudged the cat off his chest and got up. He made his way downstairs in the dark, and he crossed the icy kitchen linoleum and turned on the little