Free Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter

to his grandchildren. This letter from the Wisdom Foundation was signed by someone named Giovanni d’Amato.
    Saul looked up. For a moment the terrifying banality of the landscape seemed to dissolve into geometrical patterns of color and light. Taken by surprise, he felt the habitual weight on his heart lifting as if by pulleys, or, better yet, birds of the spirit sent by direct mail from Giovanni d’Amato. He decided to test this happiness and got into the dented car.
    He drove toward the McPhees’. The dust on the dirt road whirled up behind him. He thought he would be able to stand their middle-American happiness. Besides, Emory was probably working. No: it was Saturday. They would both be home. He would just drive by, and that would be that. So what if they were happy, these dropouts from school? He was happy, too. He would test his temporary happiness against theirs.
    The trees rushed past the car in a kind of chaotic blur.
    He pressed down on the accelerator. A solitary cloud, wandering and thick with moisture, straying overhead but not blocking the sun, let down a minute’s worth of vagrant rainbowed shower on Saul’s car. The water droplets, growing larger, bounced on the car’s hood. He turned on the wipers, causing the dust to streak in protractor curves. The rain made Saul’s car smell like a nursery of newborn vegetation. He felt the car drive over something. He hoped it wasn’t an animal, one of those anonymous rodents that squealed and died and disappeared.
    Ahead and to the left was the McPhees’.
    It looked like something out of an American genre painting, the kind of second-rate canvas hidden in the back of most museums near the elevators. Happiness lived in such houses, where people like Saul had never been permitted. In the bright standing sunshine its Midwestern Gothic acute angles pointed straight up toward heaven, a place where there had been a land rush for centuries and all the stakes had been claimed. Standing there in the bright theatrical sun—the rain had gone off on its way— the house seemed to know something, to be an answer ending with an exclamation point.
    Saul crept past the front driveway. His window was open, and, except for the engine, there was no sound, no dog barking. And no sign, either, of Anne or Emory or their baby, at least out here. Nothing on the front porch, nothing in the yard. He
could
stop and say hello. That was permitted. He could thank them for the help they had given him two months before. He hadn’t yet done that. Emory’s pickup was in the driveway, so they were at home.
Happy people don’t go much of anywhere anyway,
Saul thought, backing his car up and parking halfway in on the driveway.
    When he reached the backyard, Saul saw a flash of white, on legs, bounding at the far distances of the McPhees’ field into the woods. From this distance it looked like nothing he knew, a trick of the eye. Turning, he saw Anne McPhee sitting in a lawn chair, reading the morning paper, a glass of lemonade nearby, their baby in the playpen in the shade of the house, and Emory, some distance away in a hammock, reading the sports section. Both of them were holding up their newspapers so that their view of him was blocked.
    Quietly he crossed their back lawn, then stood in the middle, between them. Emory turned the pages of his paper, then put it down and closed his eyes. Anne went on reading. Saul stood quietly. Only the baby saw him. Saul reached down and picked out of the lawn a sprig of grass. Anne McPhee coughed. The baby was rattling one of its crib toys.
    He waited another moment and then walked back to his car. Anne and Emory had not seen him. He felt like a prowler, a spy from God. He also felt now what he had once felt only metaphorically: that he was invisible.
    When he was almost home, he remembered, or thought he remembered, that Anne McPhee had been sunning herself and had not been wearing a blouse or a bra. Or was he now imagining this? He couldn’t be