They shut Edward in the house and climbed into Macon’s car. Sarah had brought along a newspaper because there were several furniture ads. “Modern Housewares,” she read off. “But that’s all the way down on Pratt Street.”
“Might as well give it a try,” Macon said. Pratt was one of the few streets he knew how to find.
After they left their neighborhood, with its trees arching overhead, the car grew hotter and Macon rolled his window down. Sarah lifted her face to the sunlight. “Be a good day to go to the pool,” she said.
“Well, if we have time. I was thinking of asking you to lunch.”
“Oh, where?”
“Anywhere you like. Your choice.”
“Aren’t you nice,” she said.
Macon drove past two unshaven men talking on a corner. Sarah locked her door. Macon thought of what the men would be saying: “What’s coming down, man?” “Not all that much.”
The sidewalks grew more crowded. Women lugged string-handled shopping bags, an old man dragged a grocery cart, and a girl in a faded dress leaned her head against a bus stop sign.
At Modern Homewares, huge paper banners covered the plate glass windows. SPECIAL FOR FATHER’S DAY! they read. Sarah hadn’t mentioned that this was a Father’s Day sale. Macon made a point of mentioning it himself, to show it didn’t bother him. Taking her arm as they entered, he said, “Isn’t that typical. Father’s Day! They’ll capitalize on anything.”
Sarah looked away from him and said, “All they seem to have is beds.”
“I suppose it began with reclining chairs,” Macon said. “A Barcalounger for Dad, and next thing you know it’s a whole dinette set.”
“Could we see your couches,” Sarah told a salesman firmly.
The couches were all of the straight-back, Danish sort, which was fine with Macon. He didn’t really care. Sarah said, “What do you think? Legs? Or flush with the floor.”
“It’s all the same to me,” he said. He sat down heavily on something covered in leather.
Sarah chose a long, low couch that opened into a queen-sized bed. “Macon? What do you say?” she asked. “Do you like what you’re sitting on better?”
“No, no,” he said.
“Well, what do you think of this one?”
“It’s fine.”
“Don’t you have any opinion?”
“I just gave you my opinion, Sarah.”
Sarah sighed and asked the salesman if he offered same-day delivery.
They’d been so efficient about picking out the couch that time remained for other errands as well. First they drove to Hutzler’s and bought queen-sized sheets. Then they checked the furniture department for armchairs; there was a Father’s Day sale there, too. “Maybe we’re on a roll,” Sarah told Macon. But they weren’t as lucky with the armchairs; nothing looked just right. Not to Macon, at least. He gave up trying and stood watching a kiddie show on a row of television sets.
After Hutzler’s they went to get fertilizer from Rose, but Macon braked on the way and said, “Wait! There’s my bank.” It had come upon him unexpectedly — the branch where he rented a safe deposit box. “I need my passport for the France trip,‘ he told Sarah. “Might as well pick it up while I’m here.”
Sarah said she’d just wait in the car.
He had to stand in line; two elderly women were ahead of him. They were checking out their jewels for Saturday night, he liked to imagine. Or clipping their coupons — whatever coupons were. While he stood there he kept feeling the presence of someone behind him. For some reason he didn’t want to turn and find out who it was. He just kept staring ahead, every now and then glancing at his watch in a businesslike way. This person breathed very gently and smelled like flowers — bitter, real-life flowers, not the kind in perfume bottles. But when he finally squared his shoulders and looked around, he found only another stranger waiting for her jewels.
It wasn’t true that Muriel had watched in silence as he packed. Actually, she had spoken. She had said, “Macon? Are you really doing this? Do you mean to tell me you can just use a person up and then move on? You think I’m some kind of… bottle of something you don’t have any further need for? Is that how you see me, Macon?”
His turn for the vault had arrived, and he followed a girl in a miniskirt across a carpeted area, into the windowless cubicle lined with drawers. “I won’t need to take my box to the other room,” he told the girl. “I just want to get one thing.”
She gave him his card to sign and accepted his key. After she had unlocked his box she stood back, scrutinizing her nails, while he rummaged through various papers for his passport. Then he turned to tell her he was finished, but all at once he was so moved by her tact in looking elsewhere, by the delicacy that people could come up with on their own (for surely it wouldn’t have been written into the bank’s instructions)… Well, he must be going soft in the head. It was the weather or something; it was the season or something; he had not been sleeping well. He said, “Thank you very much,” and took back his key and left.
At his grandfather’s house, Rose was out front pruning the hedge. Her gardening smock was an enormous gray workshirt inherited from Charles. When she saw their car pull up she straightened and waved. Then she went on pruning while they consulted her about fertilizers. “For azaleas and what else do you have, andromeda, acid- loving plants…” she mused.
Sarah said, “Where are the children today?”
“Children?”
“Your nephew and nieces.”
“Oh, they went home to their mother.”
Sarah said, “I just assumed, since you hadn’t moved back with Julian…”
“Well, not yet, of course,” Rose said.
Macon, anxious to guard her privacy, murmured, “No, of course not,” practically at the same moment, but Sarah said, “Why? What’s keeping you?”
“Oh, Sarah, you wouldn’t believe what a state I found the boys in when I came back here,” Rose said. “They were living in their pajamas so as not to have too much laundry. They were eating gorp for their suppers.”
“I’m not even going to ask what gorp is,” Sarah said.
“It’s a mixture of wheat germ and nuts and dried—”
“But what about your apartment, Rose? What about Julian?”
“Oh, you know, I kept losing that apartment every time I turned around,” Rose said vaguely. “I’d head one block east to the grocery store and then turn west to get back again and I’d always be wrong; always. The apartment building would have worked over to the east somehow;
There was a silence. Finally Macon said, “Well, if you could get us some of that fertilizer, Rose…”
“Certainly,” she said. And she went off to the toolshed.
They had lunch at the Old Bay Restaurant — Sarah’s idea. Macon said, “Are you sure?” and Sarah said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“But you always tell me it’s boring,” Macon said.
“There are worse things than boring, I’ve decided.”
He didn’t think that was much of a recommendation, but he went along with it.
The restaurant was full, even though it was barely noon, and they had to wait a few minutes to be seated. Macon stood by the hostess’s podium trying to adjust to the dimness. He surveyed the other diners and found something odd about them. They were not the usual Old Bay crowd — middle aged, one face much like the next — but an assortment of particular and unusual individuals. He saw a priest offering a toast to a woman in a tennis dress, and a smartly suited woman with a young man in an orange gauze robe, and two cheerful schoolgirls loading all their potato chips onto the plate of a small boy. From where he stood Macon couldn’t hear what any of these people were saying; he had to guess. “Maybe the woman wants to join a convent,” he told Sarah, “and the priest is trying to discourage her.”
“Pardon?”
