Anne Tyler Omnibus by Anne Tyler

Author:Anne Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448138388
Publisher: Random House

11

MURIEL PRITCHETT, WAS how she was listed. Brave and cocky: no timorous initials for Muriel. Macon circled the number. He figured now was the time to call. It was nine in the evening. Alexander would have gone to bed. He lifted the receiver.

But what would he say?

Best to be straightforward, of course, much less hurtful; hadn’t Grandmother Leary always told them so? Muriel, last year my son died and I don’t seem to … Muriel, this has nothing to do with you personally but really I have no …

Muriel, I can’t. I just can’t.

It seemed his voice had rusted over. He held the receiver to his ear but great, sharp clots of rust were sticking in his throat.

He had never actually said out loud that Ethan was dead. He hadn’t needed to; it was in the papers (page three, page five), and then friends had told other friends, and Sarah got on the phone … So somehow, he had never spoken the words. How would he do it now? Or maybe he could make Muriel do it. Finish this sentence, please: I did have a son but he——. “He what?” she would ask. “He went to live with your wife? He ran away? He died?” Macon would nod. “But how did he die? Was it cancer? Was it a car wreck? Was it a nineteen-year-old with a pistol in a Burger Bonanza restaurant?”

He hung up.

He went to ask Rose for notepaper and she gave him some from her desk. He took it to the dining room table, sat down, and uncapped his fountain pen. Dear Muriel, he wrote. And stared at the page a while.

Funny sort of name.

Who would think of calling a little newborn baby Muriel?

He examined his pen. It was a Parker, a swirly tortoiseshell lacquer with a complicated gold nib that he liked the looks of. He examined Rose’s stationery. Cream colored. Deckle edged. Deckle! What an odd word.

Well.

Dear Muriel.

I am very sorry, he wrote, but I won’t be able to have dinner with you after all. Something has come up. He signed it, Regretfully, Macon.

Grandmother Leary would not have approved.

He sealed the envelope and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Then he went to the kitchen where Rose kept a giant city map thumbtacked to the wall.

Driving through the labyrinth of littered, cracked, dark streets in the south of the city, Macon wondered how Muriel could feel safe living here. There were too many murky alleys and stairwells full of rubbish and doorways lined with tattered shreds of posters. The gridded shops with their ineptly lettered signs offered services that had a sleazy ring to them: CHECKS CASHED NO QUESTIONS, TINY BUBBA’S INCOME TAX, SAME DAY AUTO RECOLORING. Even this late on a cold November night, clusters of people lurked in the shadows—young men drinking out of brown paper bags, middle-aged women arguing under a movie marquee that read CLOSED.

He turned onto Singleton and found a block of row houses that gave a sense of having been skimped on.

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