"Medal? Oh, the-"
"Well, you won't get it. I aim to keep if That's all right," I said.
I held out my hand. I didn't want to fust walk away without shaking bands.
But Jake wouldn't take it. His chin was still tilted and he watched me from across the two polished planes of his cheekbones. In the end I had to give up.
"Well, goodbye," I told him.
And I turned and set off in the direction we'd come from, where it seemed most likely Td find a bus terminal.
Then Jake said, "Charlotte?" I stopped.
"Keep going and IT! shoot you, Charlotte." I started walking again.
I'm aiming now. Hear? I've took the safety off. Ifs loaded. It's pointed at your heart." My footsteps had a steady sound, like rain. "Charlotte?" I continued up the street, already feeling the hole that would open in my back. I passed an elderly couple in evening clothes. Still no shot rang out. I saw now that it never would. I released my breath, marveling at my slipperiness: I had glided through so many dangers and emerged unscathed. As smooth as silk I swerved around a child, passed a glass-boxed woman in front of a theater. I reached the end of the block and looked back. There he stood, surprisingly small, still watching me. His collar was raised, his shoulders were hunched. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets. Come to think of it, I wasn't so unscathed after all.
Sixteen
The police never did recapture Jake Simms. As far as I know, they've given up the search. I told them he was going to Texas, anyway.
There is somebody new in Mama's old room: a drunk from the mourners' bench who used to be an opera singer. His name is Mr. Bentham. On good days his voice is beautiful. And Miss Feather is with us the same as always, though Dr. Sisk has moved away. He married a woman from the church last July and lives in a ranch house on the other side of town.
Julian still works at the radio shop, in between his lapses; Selinda still floats in and out of our lives, and no one has yet come for Jiggs. But Onus has stopped building dollhouse furniture and moved on to the dolls themselves: diminutive wooden people, fully jointed. Their joints are little fragments of straight pins. Their faces are drawn with a needle dipped in ink. They have distinctive features, coloring, and clothes, but share an expression of surprise, as if wondering how they got here.
And I still wheel my camera around, recording up- side-down people in unexpected costumes. But I've come to believe that their borrowed medals may tell more truths than they hide. While Saul grips his pulpit as firmly as always, and studies his congregation. No doubt they are suspended in a lens of his own, equally truthful, equally flawed.
Sometimes, when Saul can't sleep, he turns his head on the pillow and asks if I'm awake. We may have had a hard time that day: disagreed, misunderstood, come to one more invisible parting or tiny, jarring rearrangement of ourselves.
He lies on his back in the old sleigh bed and starts to wonder: will everything work out? Is he all right, am I all right, are we happy, at least in some limited way? Maybe we ought to take a trip, he says. Didn't I use to want to?
But I tell him no. I don't see the need, I say. We have been traveling for years, traveled all our lives, we are traveling still. We couldn't stay in one place if we tried. Go to sleep, I say.
And he does.
The End
A Note about the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and considers herself a Southerner. She was graduated at nineteen from Duke University, where she twice won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing, and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She has done graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University and worked for a year as the Russian bibliographer at the Duke University Library. Miss Tyler has published seven novels, and her stories have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, Harper's, and The Southern Review.
She is married to a psychiatrist, Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, and she and her husband now live in Baltimore, Maryland, with their two young children.