Read Saint Maybe for Free Online

what-do-you-call …”
    That V neckline
, he wanted to say,
plunging so low in the middle. And that skirt that whisks around your legs and makes that shimmery sound
.
    But what he said was, “That cloth is not bad at all.”
    “But would you think it cost a lot?”
    “Oh, only about a million,” he said. “Give or take a few thousand.”
    “No, don’t say that! That’s what I was afraid of. But it didn’t cost hardly anything, I promise. You want to know what it cost? Nineteen ninety-five. Can you believe it? Can you believe that’s all it cost?”
    Well, she did want his answer, after all. So he reached out to touch the fabric at her waist. It was so fine-spun it made his fingers feel as rough as rope. He curved his palm to cup her rib cage and he felt the warmth of her skin underneath. Then Lucy took a sharp step backward and he dropped his hand to his side.
    “Oh, ah, nineteen ninety-five sounds … very reasonable,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. There was a moment of silence. All he heard was Agatha’s snuffling breath.
    “But anyhow!” Lucy said, and she laughed too gaily, artificially, and lifted her bag from the table. “Thanks for your opinion!” she said. Was she being sarcastic? She owed him two dollars but she paid him five. A hundred-and-fifty-percent tip. He said, “I’ll bring yourchange next time I see you,” and she said, “No, keep it. Really.”
    He felt mortified by that.
    Walking home through the twilight, he kicked at clumps of old snow and muttered to himself. Once or twice he groaned out loud. When he entered the front hall Bee said, “Hi, hon! How was our little Daffodil?” But Ian merely brushed past her and climbed the stairs to his room.
    Over the next few days—a Friday and a weekend—he didn’t baby-sit; nor would he have ordinarily. He and Cicely went to a movie; he and his two best friends, Pig and Andrew, went bowling. Striding toward the foul line with the bowling ball suspended from his fingers, he thought of Lucy mailing that package to Wyoming. What kind of woman owns her own bowling ball? Not to mention the geisha girl figurine.
    Really there was a great deal about Lucy that was, oh, a little bit tacky, when you came right down to it. (What a relief, to discover she wasn’t flawless!) Now he recalled the grammatical slips,
It won’t be real fancy
and
It didn’t cost hardly anything;
the way she sometimes wore her hair down even with high heels; the fact that she had no people. He knew it wasn’t her fault her parents had died, but still you’d expect a few family connections—brothers and sisters, aunts, at least cousins. And how about friends? He didn’t count those two waitresses; they were just workmates. No, Lucy kept to herself, and when she went out in the afternoons she went alone and she returned alone. He envisioned her rushing in from one of her shopping trips, her cheeks flushed pink with excitement.
    Funny how she never brought any parcels back.
    Why, even last Thursday she’d brought no parcel, the day she came home with that dress.
    She hadn’t bought that dress at all. Someone had given it to her.
    She wasn’t out shopping. She was meeting someone.
    She had asked if the dress looked expensive. Not
Do you think I paid too much?
but
Could I get away with saying I paid next to nothing?
“Can you believe it?” she had asked. (Insistently, it seemed to him now.) What she’d meant was,
Will DANNY believe it, if I tell him I bought it myself?
    He watched the bowling ball crash into the pins with a hollow, splintery sound, and a thrill of malicious satisfaction zinged through him like an electrical current.
    When she phoned Monday night to ask if he could babysit the following afternoon, he felt confused by the realness of her. He had somehow forgotten the confiding effect of that gravelly little voice. But he was busy, he told her. He had to study for a test. She said, “Then how about Wednesday?”
    He said