Extract: Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June

Anne Tyler invites you to the wedding of the year in Three Days in June. In this exclusive extract, we meet Gail the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well. First thing, she loses her job. Then her ex-husband turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities... along with a cat looking for a new home.

The clock gathered itself together with a whirring of gears and struck a series of blurry notes. Nine o’clock, I was thinking; but no, it turned out to be ten. I’d been sitting there in a sort of stupor, evidently. I stood up and hung my purse in the closet, but then outside the window I saw some movement on the other side of the curtain, some dark and ponderous shape laboring up my front walk. I tweaked the curtain aside a half inch. Max, for God’s sake. Max with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and a bulky square suitcase dangling from his left hand.

I went to the front door and opened it and looked out at him through the screen. “What on earth?” I asked him.
“You’re home!” he said.
“Yes . . .”
“Debbie is at something called a Day of Beauty.”
“Right,” I said.
“But she knew ahead I was coming. I told her I was coming. I get there and no one’s home. I call her cell phone and she says she didn’t expect me so early.”
“Why did you come so early?” I asked him.
“I wanted to beat the rush. You know what Fridays are like on the Bay Bridge.”

All the more reason not to live on the other side of it, I could have pointed out. I opened the screen door for him and reached for his suitcase, but it wasn’t a suitcase; it was some kind of animal carrier. Square patch of wire grid on the end and something watchful and alert staring out from behind it gleaming- eyed. Max moved the carrier away from me a bit and said, “I’ve got it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a cat.”
“A cat!”
“Could I come in, do you think?”

I retreated and he lumbered in, out of breath, shaking the floorboards. Max was nowhere near fat, but he was weighty, broad shouldered; he always gave the impression of taking up more than his share of room, although he was not much taller than I was. In the years since we’d divorced he had grown the kind of beard that you’re not quite sure is deliberate; maybe he’d merely forgotten to shave for a while. A short gray frizzle with a frizzle of gray hair to match, and he seemed to have given up on his clothes; generally he wore stretched-out knit tops and baggy khakis. I hoped he’d brought a suit for the wedding. You never could be sure.

“Couldn’t you have just left your cat at home with food and water?” I asked, following him through the living room. “I mean, it’s already bad enough that you’re staying with Debbie yourself. In the middle of her wedding preparations, for God’s sake!”
“She said it would be fine if I stayed,” Max told me. “She said it wasn’t a problem.”
“Okay, but then to add a cat to the mix . . . Cats do very well on their own. They almost prefer it, in fact.”
“Not this one,” he said. He set the carrier on my kitchen counter. “This one is too new.”
“It’s a kitten?”
“No, no, it’s old.”
“You just said— ”
“It’s an elderly female cat who belonged to a very old woman, and now the woman has up and died and the cat is in mourning,” he told me.

There was a lot I could have asked about this, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I leaned closer to peer at the cat. “Does Debbie know you’re bringing it?” I asked him.
“Now she does.”
I waited.
“It’s complicated,” he said. He blotted his face on his shoulder. “I phoned her; I said, ‘Where are you?’ She says she’s at a Day of Beauty. ‘Did you leave a key out someplace?’ I asked her, and she says no, but she’ll be home in a few hours. ‘A few hours!’ I say. ‘I can’t wait a few hours! I’ve got a cat here!’ She says, ‘A what?’ Then she hits the roof. Tells me I can in no way bring a cat to her house, because Kenneth is allergic.”
“He is?” I said.
“Deathly allergic, is how she put it.”
“But . . . Kenneth doesn’t live there,” I said.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Max told me. “You know he stays over a lot, and besides, he does plan to live there after the wedding.”
“Well, sure, after the wedding.”
“‘Deathly’ allergic, Gail. As in, if he walks into a house where a cat has left a smidgen of dander behind, even if the cat is long gone he’ll need a respirator.”
“A respirator!”
“Or whatever you call those things that asthmatics have to carry around with them.”
“You mean an atomizer,” I said.
“No, not an atomizer; a what’s- it. A vaporizer, maybe?”
I thought it over.
“At any rate, that’s what Debbie claimed. She claimed that even if he’s just standing next to her and she has cat dander on her sweater, he will start choking up and he’ll need a . . .”

We both stood there, considering.
The cat said, “Hmm?”
We looked over at the carrier.

“Anyhow,” Max said, and he unfastened the two latches and lifted the lid. Instead of stepping out, the cat hunched lower and stared up at me. A gray-and-black tabby with a chunky face. “So I couldn’t think where to go except here,” Max said. “I knew where you hide your key. It didn’t occur to me that you would be home on a weekday.”
“Yes, well . . . ,” I said. And then I told the cat, “Hey there.” She squared her eyes at me.
“What’s her name?” I asked Max.
“I don’t know.”
“What? How could you not know?”
“I’m just the fosterer,” he told me. “I volunteer at this shelter where they need people to foster animals until they can be adopted. Ordinarily it’s kittens, batches of feral kittens that need domesticating first, but this one’s a senior citizen. I’m thinking of naming her ‘Pearl,’ at least for as long as I have her around.”
“Pearl!”
“On account of her color.”
“You can’t name a cat ‘Pearl.’ ”
“Why not?”
“Cats are so bad at language,” I told him. “They’re not the least bit like dogs. Cats just get your general tone, and ‘Pearl’ has a tone like a growl.”
“It does?”
“So does ‘Ruby.’ So does ‘Rhinestone.’ ”
“Aha!” Max said. “See there? Everything turns out for the best.”
“It does?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“You can advise me on cat lore,” he said. “Plus you might even decide to adopt her; who knows?”
“Max,” I said, “sometimes I wonder if you understand the least little thing about me.”
“But you love cats! You used to have that homely little calico cat. And this one’s accustomed to older women.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“‘Older,’ I said. Not ‘old.’”
“I do not want a cat in any way, shape, or form,” I told him. “What do you think of ‘Mary?’ ” he asked. “Or ‘Carol.’ How about that?”
“Forget it, Max,” I said. Then I added, “And you want to steer away from the r sound. An r is a growl, straight out.”
“Oh, right. Yes. Thank you.” He paused. “How about ‘Lucy’?” he said.
“Forget it, I told you.”

He sighed.

“Maybe you could drop her off at a shelter here in Baltimore,” I said. “I mean, surely they wouldn’t refuse her.”
“We’re not allowed to just dump our charges any-old-where,” he told me. “No, I’d better keep her here at your house, and then take her back to Cornboro if you really don’t want her.”
“I most emphatically do not want her,” I said. Then, “Nor do I want a houseguest.”
“Yes, but, see, there’s dander all over my clothes now. I can’t possibly go back to Debbie’s, even without the cat.”
“In fact, I wonder if you should come to the wedding, even,” I said. “Just think if Kenneth starts choking during the vows.”

This was pure mischief, on my part. I seriously doubted that Kenneth would choke; he’d always struck me as a sturdy type of guy.

But Max looked stricken. He said, “Not attend my own daughter’s wedding?”
“Well, you could maybe wear a raincoat,” I said. “Or one of those hazmat suits.”

The kitchen phone rang. We both glanced over at it. It rang again, and then a third time. “Aren’t you going to get that?” Max asked me.

But I was thinking it might be Marilee, and sure enough, after my outgoing message Marilee came on and asked, “Gail? Are you there?”

This was why I still had an actual, physical answering machine: there were too many people I might not feel like talking to.

“Because we really need to discuss this,” Marilee said. “Could you pick up, please?”

Max wrinkled his forehead at me.

“Ignore that,” I told him.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Okay . . .”

The answering machine clicked off, and I turned back to the cat. I briefly closed my eyes at her. Cats take that as reassurance; to them it’s like a smile. Then I looked off in another direction. I heard a rustle, and when I slid a glance sideways I saw her unfolding herself from the carrier by degrees and stepping gingerly onto the counter. “A little weight problem,” I murmured.

As if to demonstrate, she landed on the floor with a noticeable thud.

“I think it’s from stress,” Max said. “Apparently she’d been alone for some time before anyone realized her owner had died.”

I made a sympathetic tsking sound.

“What’s up with Marilee?” Max asked. He’d never been very good at minding his own business. I said, “Nothing’s up with Marilee.”

The cat was heading into the living room now, so I made a big show of following her. She paused to sniff at the fringe on the rug and then padded over to an armchair and sprang into it, more nimbly than you might expect.

“What does she want to discuss?” Max asked, trailing after me.

I gave up. I said, “She’s retiring in the fall and she wants the board to hire this other person in her place, this Nashville person. And the Nashville person is asking to bring in her own assistant. So I’m thinking I should just quit before they fire me.”

“Excellent,” Max said.

I turned to look at him.

“Your great talent is for teaching; you know that,” Max said.
“Dealing with all the kids who are scared to death of math.”
“You’re forgetting that teachers make no money, though,” I told him. “Why else did I put in all that hell time getting my master’s degree?”
“So? Now that Debbie’s finished law school, you can go back to doing what you’re good at.”
“It’s not that simple,” I told him.

Still, it was nice of him to say that I was good at something. But then he changed the subject. “Guess I might as well bring in the cat supplies,” he said. And he went on outside, leaving the front door open behind him even though the air conditioning was on.

I turned back to the cat. She was a bread-loaf shape in the armchair now with her front paws folded beneath her, and when she saw me looking at her she shut her eyes lazily and then opened them again.

Three Days in June is available to order now.