The Accidental Tourist

She sat down next to the oven. Claire was on the floor with Alexander, helping him open a package. Muriel, still in her coat, scanned a row of books on a shelf. “Ma—” she said. “No, never mind, I found it.” She came over to Macon with a photo album, the modern kind with clear plastic pages. “Look here,” she said, perching on the arm of his chair. “Pictures of me when I was little.”

“Why not take off your coat and stay a while,” Mrs. Dugan told her.

“Me at six months. Me in my stroller. Me and my first birthday cake.”

They were color photos, shiny, the reds a little too blue. (Macon’s own baby pictures were black-and-white, which was all that was generally available back then.) Each showed her to be a chubby, giggling blonde, usually with her hair fixed in some coquettish style— tied in a sprig at the top of her head, or in double ponytails so highly placed they looked like puppy ears. At first the stages of her life passed slowly — it took her three full pages to learn to walk — but then they speeded up. “Me at two. Me at five. Me when I was seven and a half.” The chubby blonde turned thin and dark and sober and then vanished altogether, replaced by the infant Claire. Muriel said, “Oh, well,” and snapped the album shut just midway through. “Wait,” Macon told her. He had an urge to see her at her worst, at her most outlandish, hanging out with motorcycle gangs. But when he took the album away from her and flipped to the very last pages, they were blank.

Mr. Dugan wandered in — a fair, freckled man in a plaid flannel shirt — and gave Macon a callused hand to shake and then wandered out again, mumbling something about the basement. “He’s fretting over the pipes,” Mrs. Dugan explained. “Last night it got down below zero, did you know that? He’s worried the pipes’ll freeze.”

“Oh, could I help?” Macon asked, perking up.

“Now, you just sit right where you are, Mr. Leary.”

“Macon,” he said.

“Macon. And you can call me Mother Dugan.”

“Um. ”

“Muriel tells me you’re separated, Macon.”

“Well, yes, I am.”

“Do you think it’s going to take?”

“Pardon?”

“I mean you’re not just leading this child around Robin Hood’s barn now, are you?”

“Ma, quit that,” Muriel said.

“Well, I wouldn’t have to ask, Muriel, if you had ever showed the least bit of common sense on your own. I mean face it, you don’t have such a great track record.”

“She’s just worried for me,” Muriel told Macon.

“Well, of course,” he said.

“This girl was not but thirteen years old,” Mrs. Dugan said, “when all at once it seemed boys of the very slipperiest character just came crawling out of the woodwork. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”

“Well, I don’t know why not,” Muriel told her. “That was years and years ago.”

“Seemed every time we turned around, off she’d gone to the Surf’n’Turf or the Torch Club or the Hi-Times Lounge on Highway Forty.”

“Ma, will you please open up you and Daddy’s Christmas present?”

“Oh, did you bring us a present?”

Muriel rose to fetch it from under the tree, where Claire sat with Alexander. She was helping him set up some little cardboard figures. “This one goes on the green. This one goes on the blue,” she said. Alexander jittered next to her, impatient to take over.

“Claire was the one who picked that game for him,” Mrs. Dugan said, accepting the package Muriel handed her. “I thought it was too advanced, myself.”

“It is not,” Muriel said (although she hadn’t even glanced at it). She returned to Macon’s chair. “Alexander’s just as smart as a tack. He’ll catch on in no time.”

“Nobody said he wasn’t smart, Muriel. You don’t have to take offense at every little thing a person says.”

“Will you just open your present?”

But Mrs. Dugan proceeded at her own pace. She took off the ribbon and laid it in a box on the coffee table. “Your daddy has a bit of cash for your Christmas,” she told Muriel. “Remind him before you go.” She examined the wrapping. “Will you look at that! Teeny little Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeers all over it. Real aluminum foil for their noses. I don’t know why you couldn’t just use tissue like I do.”

“I wanted it to be special,” Muriel told her.

Mrs. Dugan took off the paper, folded it, and laid it aside. Her gift was something in a gilded frame. “Well, isn’t that nice,” she said finally. She turned it toward Macon. It was a picture of Muriel and Alexander — a studio portrait in dreamy pastels, the lighting so even that it seemed to be coming from no particular place at all. Muriel was seated and Alexander stood beside her, one hand resting delicately upon her shoulder. Neither of them smiled. They looked wary and uncertain, and very much alone.

Macon said, “It’s beautiful.”

Mrs. Dugan only grunted and leaned forward to lay the photo beside the box of ribbons.