Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler Page B

years in between, so many different formations laid out for him on park benches, tent floors, and trailer furniture. Once he found her he never again lost track of her. He supplied her with change-of-address cards already stamped and filled out, with blanks left for the old address and the new. He adopted her entire family, unfolding for Duncan the mysteries of his diesel engines and his cotton candy machines and the odds on his games of chance, bringing Meg gaudy circus prizes for as long as she was a child, treating the baffled grandfather with elaborate old-world respect and sending Justine a great moldy Smithfield ham every Christmas. He would drive halfway across the state just to ask her a single question, and then overpay her ridiculously when she answered. He mourned her moves to Virginia and Pennsylvania and rejoiced when she was safely back in Maryland. He beat on her front door at unexpected times and when she was not home he threatened to fall apart.
       "I have to know!" he would cry to Duncan or Meg. "I can't make a move, I am utterly dependent on her!"
       Yet the peculiar thing (which Justine had seen too often before to wonder at) was that he very seldom took her advice. Look at all his marriages: seven, at last count. Maybe more. And how many of those had Justine approved? None. He had gone ahead anyway. Later he would come back: "Oh, you were right. I never should have done it. When will I learn?" His wives tended to leave him, taking the children along. Then sooner or later the children drifted back, and there were always a few living in his trailer-sons and stepsons and others whose relationship was not quite clear, even to him. "My wives are gone and
       I sleep alone but still I have three kids at me night and day, all ages.
       Next time I will listen to every word you say, I'll follow it to the letter," he said.
       He said it now, nearly seventeen years from the day he had first ignored her advice, while Justine laid out the cards on the coffee table in the trailer. "I'm going to do everything you tell me to this time," he said.
       "Ha," she said.
       She bent closer and peered at the cards. "Money and a jealous woman.
       You're not getting married again."
       "No, no." He sighed and stroked his mustache. "Who would marry me? I'm growing old, Justine."
       For a second she thought she had heard wrong.
       "I'm fifty-two," he said. "Do your cards tell you that?"
       It was the only fact he had ever handed her. For some reason it diminished him. Alonzo, possessing an age? When she first met him, then, he would have been thirty-five-a young, unsteady number of years for a man, but Alonzo had never been young or unsteady. She raised her eyes and found a sprinkling of white in his hair, and deep grooves extending the droop of his mustache. When he smiled at her, creases rayed out from the corners of his eyes. "Why, Alonzo," she said.
       "Yes?"
       "Why-"
       But she couldn't think what she was trying to say. And Alonzo shot his cuffs impatiently and sat forward on his stool. "Well, never mind that," he said. "Get on with my problem."
       "Tell me what it is."
       "Shall I sell the business to Mrs. Harry Mosely?"
       "Who's Mrs. Harry Mosely?"
       "What does it matter? A rich lady in Parvis, divorced, wants some kind of business different from all her friends."
       "The jealous woman."
       "Not of me."
       "Envious jealous."
       "She wears jodhpurs," Alonzo said, and shook his head.
       Justine waited.
       "Well?" he said.
       "Well, what?"
       "Do I sell or do I not? I'm asking."
       "But you haven't said what the choice is," Justine told him. "What are you selling it for? Are you joining another gold rush?"
       "No, I thought just something quiet. I have a friend who's in merchandising, he would find me something or other."
       "Merchandising?"
       "What's wrong with that?"
       "I'm going to have to study