Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [12]
She thought of how that address book must have aged by now—smelling mousy, turning brittle. It dated back to long before her sight had started dimming. Emmaline was in it, and Emmaline had been dead for twenty years or more. So was Mrs. Simmons dead, down in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Uncle Seward’s widow and perhaps his daughter too. Why, everybody in that book was six feet under, she supposed, except for Beck.
She remembered that he took a whole page—one town after another crossed out. She’d kept it up to date because she’d imagined needing to call him in an emergency. What emergency had she had in mind? She couldn’t think of any that would be eased in the slightest by his presence. She’d like to see his face when he received an invitation to her funeral. An “invite,” he would call it. “Imagine that!” he would say, shocked. “She left me first, after all. Here’s this invite to her funeral.” She could hear him now.
She laughed.
The doctor came, stamping his feet. “Is it snowing out?” she asked him.
“Snowing? No.”
“You were stamping your feet.”
“No,” he said, “it’s just cold.” He settled on the edge of her bed. “Feels like my toes are falling off,” he told her. “My knee bones say we’re going to have a frost tonight.”
She waved away the small talk. “Listen here,” she said. “Ezra called you over by mistake.”
“Is that so.”
“I’m really feeling fine. Maybe earlier I was under the weather, but now I’m much improved.”
“I see,” he said. He took her wrist in his icy, wrinkled fingers. (He was nearly as old as she was, and had all but given up his practice.) He held it for what seemed to be several minutes. Then he said, “How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where’s the phone?” he asked Ezra.
“Wait! Dr. Vincent! Wait!” Pearl cried.
He had laid down her wrist, but now he set his hand on hers and she felt him leaning over her, breathing pipe tobacco. “Yes?” he said.
“I’m not going to any hospital.”
“Of course you’re going.”
She spoke clearly, maybe a little too loudly, directing her voice toward the ceiling. “Now, I’ve thought this through,” she told him. “I don’t want those crank-up beds and professional smells. It would kill me.”
“Dear lady—”
“And you know they wouldn’t be able to give me penicillin.”
“Penicillin, no …”
“That’s what I took in forty-three.”
“Don’t tire yourself,” the doctor said. “I remember all about it.”
Or maybe it was ’44. But Beck had not yet left. He’d been away on a business trip, and brought back an archery set for the children. The things he spent his money on! When they were never well off, in the best of times. He took the set on their Sunday drive to a field outside the city—nailed the canvas target to a tree trunk. Oh, he never gave a thought to danger. He was not the type to lie awake nights listing all that could go wrong. Well, anyway. She couldn’t say just how it had happened (she was arranging a bouquet of winter grasses at the time, as she no longer partook in sports), but somehow, she got hit. It was Cody who drew the bowstring, but that was incidental; Cody was not the one she had blamed, after the first little flurry. She blamed Beck, who through sheer thoughtlessness if not intention had shot her through the heart; or not the heart exactly but the fleshy part above it, between breast and shoulder. It was the queerest sensation, like being slapped—no sting whatsoever, but a jarring and then a disk of bright blood on her favorite blouse. “Oh!” she said, and she looked down, and went on holding her weeds. Then the pain began. Beck, white faced, pulled the arrow out. Jenny started crying. They drove straight home, forgetting to untack the target from the tree, but by the time they arrived the bleeding had stopped and it appeared there was no real danger. Pearl dressed the wound herself—iodine and gauze. Two days later, she noticed something amiss. The wound was not better but worse, inflamed, and she had a fever. Beck was on another trip, and she had to go to the doctor alone, rushing off breathless