Free Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler

Agatha told him. She unfolded a cloth and started wiping off the table.
    “What did you do with my crayons?”
    “They were all wet and runny.”
    “You can’t just throw them away!”
    He started rooting through the waste can. Agatha said, “Stop that! I just got everything nice again!”
    “You better give me back my crayons, Agatha.”
    Their mother said, “Is it still daytime?”
    She was standing in the doorway in her slip. Her pillow had made a mark across one cheek and she didn’t have any makeup on. “I thought it was night,” she said. “Is that Daphne I hear?”
    “Make Agatha give me back my crayons, Mama!”
    But their mother was drifting down the hall, heading toward Daphne’s “Oho! Oho!”
    “Stealer!” Thomas hissed at Agatha. “Crayon stealer!”
    She put the wet cloth in the sink. “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” she said, “but names will never—”
    “You can go to jail for stealing!”
    “Is this my little Daphne?” their mother said, back again with Daphne in her arms. “Is this my sweetheart?”
    She sat in a kitchen chair and settled Daphne on her lap. Daphne’s diaper was dry but it was so loose it pouched in front of her stomach. The table was clean but it was damp where Agatha had wiped it. Everything looked fine but just barely, like a room where you walk in and get the feeling something was rustling and whispering till half a second ago. But their mother didn’t seem to notice. She stared down at Daphne with her face bare-naked and erased and pale. “Is this my Daphne?” she kept saying, “Is this my baby Daphne?” so it began to sound as if she really did wonder. “Is this her?” she asked. “Is it her? Is it?” And she looked up at Thomas and Agatha and waited for them to answer.
    When the hottest part of the day was over, they got ready for their walk to the typewriter store. This was something they’d started doing just in the past few weeks, but already there was a pattern to it. Agatha liked patterns. So did Thomas. Together they hauled Daphne’s stroller out of the coat closet and unfolded it. Daphne watched from the rug, flapping her arms up and down when she heard the wheels squeak. Maybe she liked patterns, too.
    They went to see if their mother was ready, but shewas shut up in her bathroom. When she came out, she wore her white blouse that wrapped and tied at the side and her watery flowing India skirt. She blotted her lipstick on a tissue and asked, “How do I look?”
    “You look nice,” they both told her.
    From the living room, Daphne made a fussy sound. Their mother sighed and picked up her bag. “Let’s go,” she said.
    The air outdoors felt heavy and warm, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down so hard anymore. Their mother walked in front, wheeling Daphne in her stroller, and Thomas and Agatha followed. Thomas’s shirt was still buttoned wrong. Agatha’s playsuit bunched at the crotch. She thought she and Thomas should have been dressed up too, if they were trying to make friends with the typewriter man, but that didn’t seem to have crossed their mother’s mind. Sometimes lately there were these holes in the way she did things, places she just fell apart. Like last night, when she got lost in the middle of what she was saying and couldn’t find her way out again. “Do you believe this?” she had been saying. “That I’m back to … back to …” Then she’d just stared. It had frightened them. Thomas started crying and he flew at her with both fists. “Back to nothing,” she had said finally. She was like a record player you had to jostle when it hit a crack. Then she’d said, “I think I’ll go to bed,” although it wasn’t even dark outside and Daphne hadn’t been put down for the night yet.
    They passed the house with all the statues in the yard—elves and baby deer and a row of ducks. Agatha wished their own yard had statues, but her mother said statues were common. “Right now,” she said,