Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [107]
Luke said, “Baltimore, Maryland.”
“Folks know you’re going?”
“Sure,” said Luke.
The driver shot him a glance.
“Why, my folks … live in Baltimore,” Luke told him.
“Oh, then.”
The truck started up again. They rumbled past the shopping mall where Luke’s mother went for groceries. A green sign swung overhead, listing points north. “Well,” said the driver, adjusting his mirror, “I tell you: I can carry you as far as Richmond. That’s where I have to veer west.”
“Okay,” said Luke.
Even Richmond, after all, was farther than he’d ever meant to go.
On the radio, Billy Swan was singing “I Can Help.” The driver hummed along in a creaky voice that never quite hit the right note. His thin gray hair, Luke saw, had recently been combed; it lay close to his skull in damp parallel lines. He held a cigarette between his fingers but he didn’t light it. His fingernails were so thick and ridged, they might have been cut from yellow corduroy.
“In the summer of fifty-six,” he said, “I was passing along this very road with my wife in a Safeway grocery truck when she commences to go into labor. Not but eight months gone and she proceeds directly into labor. Lord God! I recall to this day. She says, ‘Clement, I think it’s my time.’ Well, I was young then. Inexperienced. I thought a baby came one-two-three. I thought we didn’t have a moment to spare. And also, you know what they say: a seven-month baby will turn out good but an eight-month baby won’t make it. I can’t figure why that should be. So anyhow, I put on the brakes. I’m shaking all over. My brake foot is so shaky we’re just wobbling down the highway. You see that sign over there? Leading off to the right? See that hospital sign? Well, that is where I taken her. Straight up that there road. I never come by here but what I recall it.”
Luke looked politely at the hospital sign, and then swiveled his neck to go on looking after they had passed. It was the only response he could think of.
“Labor lasted thirty-two hours,” the driver said. “Safeway thought I’d hijacked their rig.”
“Well,” said Luke, “but the baby got born okay.”
“Sure,” the driver told him. “Five-pound girl. Lisa Michelle.” He thought a moment. Then he said, “She died later on, though.”
Luke cleared his throat.
“Crib death is what they call it nowadays,” said the driver. He swerved around a trailer. “Ever hear of it?”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“Sudden crib death. Six months old. Light of my life. Bright as a button, too—loved me to bits. I’d come home and she would just rev right up—wheel her arms and legs like a windmill soon as she set eyes on me. Then she went and died.”
“Well, gosh,” said Luke.
“Now I got others,” the driver said. “Want to see them? Turn down that sun visor over your head.”
Luke turned down the visor. A color photo, held in place by a pink plastic clothespin, showed three plain girls in dresses so new and starchy that it must have been Easter Sunday.
“The youngest is near about your age,” the driver said. “What are you: thirteen, fourteen?” He honked at a station wagon that had cut too close in front. “They’re nice girls,” he said, “but I don’t know. It’s not the same, somehow. Seems like I lost the … attachment. Lost the knack of getting attached. I mean, I like them; shoot, I love them, but I just don’t have the … seems to me I can’t get up the energy no more.”
A lady on the radio was advertising Chevrolets. The driver switched stations and Barbra Streisand came on, showing off as usual. “But you ought to see my wife!” the driver said. “Isn’t it amazing? She loves those kids like the very first one. She just started in all over. I don’t know what to make of her. I look at her and I can’t believe it. ‘Dotty,’ I say, ‘really it all comes down to nothing. It’s not for anything,