Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler Page B

her afternoon nap, she made a noise like singing. “La!” she called. But the only ones who heard were Thomas and Agatha. They were coloring at the kitchen table. Their crayons slowed and they looked at each other. Then they looked toward their mother’s room. Nowadays their mother took naps too. She said it was the heat. She said if they would just let her be she would stay in bed from spring till fall, sleeping away this whole hot, muggy summer.
    “La!” Daphne called again.
    They couldn’t pick her up themselves because last week Thomas had dropped her. He’d been trying to feed her a bottle and she had somehow tumbled to the floor and bumped her head. After that their mother said neither one of them could hold her anymore, which wasn’t at all fair to Agatha. Agatha had turned seven this past April and she was big for her age besides. She would never have allowed Daphne to wiggle away like that.
    Now Daphne was talking to herself in a questioning tone of voice, like, Where
is
everybody? Have they all gone off and left me?
    Agatha’s page of the coloring book had an outline of an undressed man full of veins and arteries. You were supposed to color the veins blue and the arteries red. A tiny B and R started you off and from then on youwere on your own, boy. Tough luck if you slipped over onto the wrong branch accidentally and started coloring the red parts blue. It was just about the most boring picture in the world but Agatha kept at it, even when the veins narrowed to black threads and she didn’t have a hope of staying inside the lines.
    Thomas’s page was boring too, but at least there were more shapes to it. His undressed man had different organs—pipes and beans and balloony things. He got to do that page because the coloring book was his, but then he pretended the organs didn’t exist. He smeared over them every which way with a purple crayon, giving the man a suit that ended jaggedly at his wrists and bare ankles. “Now you’ve gone and ruined it,” Agatha told him.
    “I did not. I made it better.”
    “You’re bearing down too hard, too. Look at what you did to your crayon.”
    He looked. Earlier he’d peeled the paper off and now the crayon curved sideways in the heat from his hand, like their mother’s poor bent candles in the napkin drawer.
    “I don’t care,” he said.
    “Your last purple crayon!”
    “I didn’t like it anyhow,” he said, “and this coloring book is stupid. Who gave me this stupid coloring book?”
    “Danny gave it to you,” Agatha said.
    He clapped a hand over his mouth.
    Danny hadn’t given him the coloring book; it was Grandma Bedloe. She’d picked it up at the Pantry Pride one day when she went to buy their mother some food. But Thomas always worried that Danny was listening to them up in heaven, so Agatha said, “He bought it as a special, special present, and he hoped very much you would like it.”
    Thomas removed his hand and said loudly, “I do like it.”
    “Then why’d you mess all over it?”
    “I made a mistake.”
    Daphne said, “Oho! Oho!”—not laughing, as you might imagine, but starting to complain. The next step would be real wailing, all sad and lost and lonely. Thomas and Agatha
hated
that. Thomas said, “Go tell Mama.”
    “You go.”
    “You’re the oldest.”
    “I’m not in the mood.”
    “Last time I went, she cried,” Thomas said.
    “She was having a difficult day.”
    “Maybe this day is difficult too.”
    “If you go,” Agatha said, “I’ll give you my patent leather purse.”
    “I don’t use a purse.”
    “My plastic camera?”
    “Your camera’s broken.”
    Daphne had reached the wailing stage. Agatha started feeling desperate. She said, “We could stand next to the crib, maybe. Just talk and smile and stuff.”
    “Okay.”
    They got up and went down the hall, past the closed door of their mother’s room and into the children’s room. It smelled of dirty diapers. Daphne was sitting in that superstraight