Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [109]
Luke stared.
“They are not,” said his father. “Really, Sammy.” He told Luke, “That’s my graduating class in high school. Boys and girls. Last year they had a reunion; I didn’t go but they sent us this address list.”
“Now we’re looking up the girls,” Sammy said.
“Not all the girls, Sammy.”
“The girls that you went out with.”
“My wife is divorcing me,” Dan told Luke. He seemed to think this explained everything. He faced forward again, and Luke said, “Oh.” Another rest center floated by, a distant forest of Texaco and Amoco signs. A moving van honked obligingly when Sammy gave the signal out the window. Sammy squealed and bounced all the harder—a spiky mass of bones and striped T-shirt, flapping shorts, torn sneakers.
“What year are you in school?” Dan asked Luke.
“I’m going into ninth grade.”
“Read any Hemingway? Catcher in the Rye? What are they giving you to read?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m new,” said Luke.
He could easily picture Dan as a teacher. He would wear his jeans in the classroom. He’d be one of those casual, comradely types that Luke had never quite trusted. Better to have him in suit and tie; at least then you knew where you stood.
“In Washington,” Sammy said, “there’s two girls, Patty and Lena.”
“Don’t say girls, say women,” Dan told him.
“Patty Sears and Lena Sparrow.”
“I’m better on the S’s,” Dan said to Luke. “They were in my homeroom.”
“Lena we hear is separated,” Sammy said.
Luke said, “But what do you do when you visit? What is there to do?”
“Oh, sit around,” Sammy said. “Stay a few days if they ask us. Play with their dogs and their cats and their kids. Most of them do have kids. And husbands.”
“Well, then,” said Luke. “If they’ve got husbands …”
“But we don’t know that till we get there. Do we,” Sammy said.
“Sammy’s a little mixed up,” Dan said. “It’s not as though we’re hunting replacements. We’re just traveling. This divorce has come as a shock and I’m just, oh, traveling back. I’m visiting old friends.”
“But only girl friends,” Sammy pointed out.
“They’re girls I used to get along fine with. Not sweethearts, necessarily. But they liked me; they thought I was fine. Or at least, they seemed to. I assumed they did. I don’t know). Maybe they were just acting polite. Maybe I was a mess all along.”
Luke couldn’t think what to say.
“So listen!” Dan told him. “You read The Great Gatsby yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How about Lord of the Flies? You get to Lord of the Flies?”
“I haven’t read anything,” said Luke. “I’ve been moved around a lot; anyplace I go they’re doing Silas Marner.”
This seemed to throw Dan into some kind of depression. His shoulders sagged and he said no more.
Sammy finally stopped bouncing and sat back with a Jack and Jill. Pages turned, rattling in the hot wind that blew through the car. On the seat between Dan and Luke, Dan’s address list fluttered. It didn’t seem very long. Four or five sheets of paper, two columns to a sheet; it would be used up in no time. Luke said, “Um …”
Dan looked over at him.
“You must have gone to college,” Luke said.
“Yes.”
“Or even graduate school.”
“Just college.”
“Don’t you have some addresses from there?”
“College isn’t the same,” said Dan. “I wouldn’t be going far enough back. Why,” he said, struck by a thought, “college is where I met my wife!”
“Oh, I see,” Luke said.
Outside Washington, Dan stopped the car to let him off. On the horizon was a haze of buildings that Dan said was Alexandria. “Alexandria, Virginia?” Luke asked. He didn’t understand what that had to do with Washington. But Dan, who seemed in a hurry, was already glancing in his side-view mirror. Sammy hung out the window calling, “Bye, Luke! When will I see you again? Will you come and visit when we find a place? Write me a letter, Luke!”
“Sure,” said Luke, waving. The car rolled off.
By now it must be four o’clock, at least, but it didn’t seem to Luke that he felt any cooler. His eyes ached from squinting in the sunlight. His hair had grown stringy and stiff. Something about this road, though