they go and have an accident and he never offers again. Even when she lets him know she don’t have her car some days, he never offers again.”
“He does live clear up in Towson,” Muriel said.
“I believe he thinks you’re bad luck.”
“He lives up in Towson and I live down on Singleton Street! What do you expect?”
“Next he got a Mercedes sports car,” Claire put in.
“Well, sports cars,” Mr. Dugan said. “We don’t even talk about those.”
Alexander said, “Can I be excused now?”
“I really had high hopes for Dr. Kane,” Mrs. Dugan said sadly.
“Oh, quit it, Ma.”
“You did, too! You said you did!”
“Why don’t you just hush up and drink your drink.”
Mrs. Dugan shook her head, but she took another sip of liqueur.
They left in the early evening, when the last light had faded and the air seemed crystallized with cold. Claire stood in the doorway singing out, “Come back soon! Thanks for the skirt! Merry Christmas!” Mrs. Dugan shivered next to her, a sweater draped over her shoulders. Mr. Dugan merely lifted an arm and disappeared — presumably to check on the basement again.
Traffic was heavier now. Headlights glowed like little white smudges. The radio — having given up on Christmas for another year — played “I Cut My Fingers on the Pieces of Your Broken Heart,” and the toolbox rattled companionably in the backseat.
“Macon? Are you mad?” Muriel asked.
“Mad?”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Why, no.”
She glanced back at Alexander and said no more.
It was night when they reached Singleton Street. The Butler twins, bundled into identical lavender jackets, stood talking with two boys on the curb. Macon parked and opened the back door for Alexander, who had fallen asleep with his chin on his chest. He gathered him up and carried him into the house. In the living room, Muriel set down her own burdens — the toolbox, Alexander’s new game, and a pie Mrs. Dugan had pressed on them — and followed Macon up the stairs. Macon walked sideways to keep Alexander’s feet from banging into the wall. They went into the smaller of the bedrooms and he laid Alexander on the bed. “I know what you must be thinking,” Muriel said. She took Alexander’s shoes off. “You’re thinking, ‘Oh, now I see, this Muriel was just on the lookout for anybody in trousers.’ Aren’t you.”
Macon didn’t answer. (He worried they’d wake Alexander.)
“I know what you’re thinking!”
She tucked Alexander in. Turned off the light. They started back downstairs. “But that’s not the way it was; I swear it,” she said. “Oh, of course since he was single the possibility did cross my mind. Who would I be kidding if I said it didn’t? I’m all alone, raising a kid. Scrounging for money. Of course it crossed my mind!”
“Well, of course,” Macon said mildly.
“But it wasn’t like she made it sound,” Muriel told him.
She clattered after him across the living room. When he sat on the couch she sat next to him, still in her coat. “Are you going to stay?” she asked.
“If you’re not too sleepy.”
Instead of answering, she tipped her head back against the couch. “I meant are you giving up on me. I meant did you want to stop seeing me.”
“Why would I want to stop seeing you?”
“After how bad she made me look.”
“You didn’t look bad.”
“Oh, no?”
When she was tired, her skin seemed to tighten over her bones. She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids.
“Last Christmas,” Macon said, “was the first one we had without Ethan. It was very hard to get through.”
He often found himself talking with her about Ethan. It felt good to say his name out loud.
“We didn’t know how to have a childless Christmas anymore,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, after all, we managed before we had him, didn’t we?’ But in fact I couldn’t remember how. It seemed to me we’d
He smoothed Muriel’s hair off her forehead. “This one was better,” he said.
She opened her eyes and studied him a moment. Then she slipped her hand in her pocket, came up with something and held it toward him — palming it, like a secret. “For you,” she said.
“For me?”
“I’d like you to have it.”
It was a snapshot stolen from her family album: Muriel as a toddler, clambering out of a wading pool.
She meant, he supposed, to give him the best of her. And so she had. But the best of her was not that child’s Shirley Temple hairdo. It was her fierceness — her spiky, pugnacious fierceness as she fought her way toward the camera with her chin set awry and her eyes bright slits of determination. He thanked her. He said he would keep it forever.
fourteen
You would have to say that he was living with her now. He began to spend all his time at her house, to contribute toward her rent and her groceries. He kept his shaving things in her bathroom and squeezed his clothes among the dresses in her closet. But there wasn’t one particular point at which he made the shift. No, this was a matter of day by day. First there was that long Christmas vacation when Alexander was home alone; so why shouldn’t Macon stay on with him once he’d spent the night there? And why not fetch his typewriter and work at the kitchen table? And then why not remain for supper, and after that for bed?
Though if you needed to put a date on it, you might say he truly moved in the afternoon he moved Edward in. He’d just got back from a business trip — an exhausting blitz of five southern cities, not one of which was any warmer than Baltimore — and he stopped by Rose’s house to check the animals. The cat was fine, Rose said. (She had to speak above Edward’s yelps; he was frantic with joy and relief.) The cat had probably not noticed Macon was missing. But Edward, well… “He spends a lot of time sitting in the hall,” she said, “staring at the door. He keeps his head cocked and he waits for you to come back.”
That did it. He brought Edward with him when he returned to Singleton Street.
“What do you think?” he asked Muriel. “Could we keep him just a day or two? See if Alexander can take it, without any shots?”
“I can take it!” Alexander said. “It’s cats that get to me; not dogs.”
Muriel looked doubtful, but she said they could give it a try.
Meanwhile, Edward darted madly all over the house snuffling into corners and under furniture. Then he sat in front of Muriel and grinned up at her. He reminded Macon of a schoolboy with a crush on his teacher; all his fantasies were realized, here he was at last.
