The Accidental Tourist

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. The roofs were flat, the windows flush and lacking depth. There was nothing to spare, no excess material for overhangs or decorative moldings, no generosity. Most were covered in formstone, but the bricks of Number 16 had been painted a rubbery maroon.

An orange bugproof bulb glowed dimly above the front stoop.

He got out of the car and climbed the steps. He opened the screen door, which was made of pitted aluminum. It clattered in a cheap way and the hinges shrieked. He winced. He took the letter from his pocket and bent down.

"I've got a double-barreled shotgun," Muriel said from inside the house, "and I'm aiming it exactly where your head is."

He straightened sharply. His heart started pounding. (Her voice sounded level and accurate-like her shotgun, he imagined.) He said, "It's Macon."

"Macon?"

The latch clicked and the inner door opened several inches. He saw a sliver of Muriel in a dark-colored robe. She said, "Macon! What are you doing here?"

He gave her the letter.

She took it and opened it, using both hands. (There wasn't a trace of a shotgun.) She read it and looked up at him.

He saw he had done it all wrong.

"Last year," he said, "I lost ... I experienced a ... loss, yes, I lost my . . ."

She went on looking into his face.

"I lost my son," Macon said. "He was just ... he went to a hamburger joint and then . . . someone came up, a holdup man, and shot him. I can't go to dinner with people! I can't talk to their little boys! You have to stop asking me. I don't mean to hurt your feelings but I'm just not up to this, do you hear?"

She took one of his wrists very gently and she drew him into the house, still not fully opening the door, so that he had a sense of slipping through something, of narrowly evading something. She closed the door behind him. She put her arms around him and hugged him.

"Every day I tell myself it's time to be getting over this," he said into the space above her head. "I know that people expect it of me. They used to offer their sympathy but now they don't; they don't even mention his name. They think it's time my life moved on. But if anything, I'm getting worse. The first year was like a bad dream-I was clear to his bedroom door in the morning before I remembered he wasn't there to be wakened.