Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [135]
“Your Grandpa Tull.”
“Oh,” she said, taking a seat. “Do us kids get wine?”
“Joe, I’d like you to meet my father,” Jenny said.
“Really?” said Joe. “Gosh.” But then he had to figure out the high-chair strap.
The last two children slipped into the empty chairs on either side of Beck. They twined their feet through the rungs, set pointy elbows on the table. Surrounded, Beck gazed first to his left and then to his right. “Will you look at this!” he said.
“Pardon?” Jenny asked.
“This group. This gathering. This … assemblage!”
“Oh,” said Jenny, taking a bib from her purse. “Yes, it’s quite a crowd.”
“Eleven, twelve … thirteen … counting the baby, it’s fourteen people!”
“There would have been fifteen, but Slevin’s off at college,” Jenny said.
Beck shook his head. Jenny tied the bib around the baby’s neck.
“What we’ve got,” said Beck, “is a … well, a crew. A whole crew.”
Phoebe, who was religious, started loudly reciting a blessing. Mrs. Potter set a steaming bowl of soup before Beck. He sniffed it, looking doubtful.
“It’s eggplant soup,” Ezra told him.
“Ah, well, I don’t believe …”
“Eggplant Soup Ursula. A recipe left behind by one of my very best cooks.”
“On this day of death,” Phoebe said, “the least some people could do is let a person pray in silence.”
“She cooked by astrology,” Ezra said. “I’d tell her, ‘Let’s have the endive salad tonight,’ and she’d say, ‘Nothing vinegary, the stars are wrong,’ and up would come some dish I’d never thought of, something I would assume was a clear mistake, but it worked; it always worked. There might be something to this horoscope business, you know? But last summer the stars advised her to leave, and she left, and this place has never been the same.”
“Tell us the secret ingredient,” Jenny teased him.
“Who says there’s a secret ingredient?”
“Isn’t there always a secret ingredient? Some special, surprising trick that you’d only share with blood kin?”
“Well,” said Ezra. “It’s bananas.”
“Aha.”
“Without bananas, this soup is nothing.”
“On this day of death,” Phoebe said, “do we have to talk about food?”
“It is not a day of death,” Jenny told her. “Use your napkin.”
“The thing is,” Beck said. He stopped. “What I mean to say,” he said, “it looks like this is one of those great big, jolly, noisy, rambling … why, families!”
The grown-ups looked around the table. The children went on slurping soup. Beck, who so far hadn’t even dipped his spoon in, sat forward earnestly. “A clan, I’m talking about,” he said. “Like something on TV. Lots of cousins and uncles, jokes, reunions—”
“It’s not really that way at all,” Cody told him.
“How’s that?”
“Don’t let them mislead you. It’s not the way it appears. Why, not more than two or three of these kids are even related to you. The rest are Joe’s, by a previous wife. As for me, well, I haven’t been with these people in years—couldn’t tell you what that baby’s name is. Is it a boy or a girl, by the way? Was I even informed of its birth? So don’t count me in your clan. And Becky down there, at the end of the table—”
“Becky?” said Beck. “Does she happen to be named for me, by any chance?”
Cody stopped, with his mouth open. He turned to Jenny.
“No,” said Jenny, wiping the baby’s chin. “Her name’s Rebecca.”
“You think we’re a family,” Cody said, turning back. “You think we’re some jolly, situation-comedy family when we’re in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.”
“Oh, Cody,” Ezra said.
“A raving, shrieking, unpredictable witch,” Cody told Beck. “She slammed us against the wall and called us scum and vipers, said she wished us dead, shook us till our teeth rattled, screamed in our faces. We never knew from one day to the next, was she all right? Was she not? The tiniest thing could set her off. ‘I