The Tin Can Tree by Anne Tyler Page A

okay,” James said. But Mrs. Hammond hadn’t stayed to hear his answer.
    He folded his equipment up and put it on the porch, out of the way of the children. Then he went across the yard to the driveway, where the others were standing in line for ice cream. They looked different now, quick-movingand flexible, with the paper-doll stiffness gone. In a way James was sorry. Some of the best pictures he had were these poker-straight rows of families, Hammonds and Ballews and Burnetts; he kept copies of them filed away in his darkroom, and sometimes on long lonesome days he pulled them out and looked at them a while, with a sort of faraway sadness coming up in him if he looked too long. He might have seen any one of those families only that morning in the hardware store, but when he looked at their faces in pictures they seemed lost and long ago. (“I just wish once you’d take a
giggly
picture,” Ansel said. “You make me so sorrowful.”) Thinking about that made James smile, and the girl in front of him turned around and looked up at him.
    “I’m thinking,” he told her.
    “That’s what it looked like,” she said. Her name was Maisie Hammond, and she lived across town from here and sometimes came visiting Ansel. She thought Ansel was wonderful. James was just considering this when she said, “How’s that brother of yours?” and he smiled at her.
    “Just fine,” he said. “He’s home reading magazines.”
    “Well, say hello to him.” She moved up a space in line, still facing in James’s direction and walking backwards. Standing out in the sunlight like this she was pretty, with her towhead shining and her white skin nearly transparent, but Ansel had always said she was homely and only out to catch a good husband (it was rumored James and Ansel came from an old family). Whenever she came visiting, Ansel turned his face to the wall and played sicker than he was. That was how he planned to scare her off, but Maisie only stayed longerthen and fussed around his couch. She liked taking care of people. She would fetch pillows and ice-water, and Ansel would wave them away. When she was gone, James would say, “Ansel, what you want to treat her like that for?” But by that time Ansel had fooled even himself, and only tossed his head on the pillow and worried about how faint he felt. To make it up to Maisie now (although she wasn’t aware there
was
anything to be made up), James stepped closer to her in the line and said, “Maisie, it’s been a good two weeks since you’ve been by.”
    “Two
days,
” said Maisie. “Day before yesterday I was there.”
    “I never heard about it.”
    “You were off somewhere. Taking care of some arrangements for the Pikes.”
    The man ahead of her left with his Dixie cup of ice cream, and Maisie turned forward again and took two cups from the stack on the table. “Here,” she said. She passed him a fudge ripple, with a little paper spoon lying across the top of it. “The children got to the strawberry before us.”
    “That’s all right,” said James. “I don’t like strawberry.”
    He followed her back across the lawn, preferring to stick with her rather than interrupt the little individual reunions that were going on among the others. When she settled on the porch steps, fluffing her skirt out around her, he said, “You mind if I sit with you?” She shook her head, intent on opening her ice cream. “I’m going to take a picture of your great-aunt,” he said.
    “Oh, her.”
    “Do you like sitting out in the sun like this?”
    “Yes,” she said. But she looked hot; she was toothin and bird-boned, and being the slightest bit uncomfortable made her seem about to topple over. James was used to Joan, who was unbreakable and built of solid flesh.
    When he had pried the lid off his own ice cream, and dipped into it with his paper spoon, he said, “It’s sort of melty-looking.” Maisie didn’t answer. She was staring off across the yard. “Better eat yours before