Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [128]
Ezra said, “Maybe you could be her doctor.”
“I’m her relative, Ezra.”
“So much the better,” Ezra said.
“Besides, my field is pediatrics.”
“Jenny,” said Ezra. “What would you say—”
He stopped. Jenny raised her eyebrows.
“What would you say is your patients’ most common disease?”
“Mother-itis,” she told him.
“Oh.”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s not, um, cancer or anything.”
“Why do you ask?” she said again.
He only shrugged.
After she’d collected the ironing, and made a shopping list, and rounded up the children, she said that she had to be off. She brushed her cheek against her mother’s and patted Ezra’s arm. “I’ll walk you to the car,” he said.
“Never mind.”
He walked her anyway, relieving her of the laundry bag while she carried the baby astride her hip. They passed the mailman. He was bent so low to the ground that he didn’t even notice them.
Out by the car, Ezra said, “I’ve got this lump.”
“Oh?” said Jenny. “Where?”
He touched his groin. “In the morning it starts out small,” he said, “but by evening it’s so big, it’s like a rock or something in my trouser pocket. I’m wondering if it’s, you know. Cancer.”
“It’s not cancer. More likely a hernia, from the sound of it,” she said. “Go see a doctor.” She got in the car and buckled the baby into her carrier. Then she leaned out the open window. “Do I have all the children?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She waved and drove off.
Back in the house, his mother was hovering at the window exactly as if she could see. “That girl has too big a family,” she said. “I suppose her looks must be ruined by now.”
“No, I haven’t noticed it.”
“And her hair. Honestly. Ezra, tell me the truth,” she said. “How does Jenny seem to you?”
“Oh, the same as always.”
“I mean, don’t you think she’s let herself go? What about what she was wearing, for instance?”
He tried to remember. It was something faded, but perfectly acceptable, he guessed. Was it blue? Gray? He tried to picture her hairdo, the style of her shoes, but only came up with the chiseled lines that had always, even in her girlhood, encircled her neck—rings of lines that gave her a lush look. For some reason, those lines made him sad now, and so did Jenny’s olive hands with the ragged, oval fingernails, and the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, and the news that his life would, after all, go on and on and on.
“February sixth, nineteen-ten,” Ezra read aloud. “I baked a few Scottish Fancies but they wouldn’t do to take to a tea.”
His mother, listening intently, thought that over a while. Then she made her gesture of dismissal and started rocking again in her rocker.
“I hitched up Prince and rode downtown for brown silk gloves and an ice bag. Then got out my hat frames and washed my straw hat. For supper fixed a batch of—”
“Move on,” his mother said.
He riffled through the pages, glimpsing buttonhole stitch and watermelon social and set of fine furs for $22.50. “Early this morning,” he read to his mother, “I went out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt by the stable with my pinafore a mess and the perspiration rolling down my back, wiped my face on my sleeve, reached for the trowel, and all at once thought, Why I believe that at just this moment I am absolutely happy.”
His mother stopped rocking and grew very still.
“The Bedloe girl’s piano scales were floating out her window,” he read, “and a bottle fly was buzzing in the grass, and I saw that I was kneeling on such a beautiful green little planet. I don’t care what else might come about, I have had this moment. It belongs to me.”
That was the end of the entry. He fell silent.
“Thank you, Ezra,” his mother said. “There’s no need to read any more.”
Then she fumbled up from her chair, and let him lead her to the kitchen for lunch. He guided her gently, inch by inch. It seemed to him that he had to be very careful with her. They were traversing the curve of the earth, small and steadfast, surrounded by companions: Jenny flying past with her children, the drunks at the stadium sobering the instant their help was needed, the baseball players obediently