“Or we could move in with you,” she said. “Either way you preferred.”
“With me? But my sister and my—”
“I’m talking about
“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
“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 sisters. 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.
