Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [14]
“Children,” she had said. This was just before Cody left for college, the day she’d burned Beck’s letters. She said, “Children, there’s something I want to discuss with you.”
Cody was talking about a job. He had to find one in order to help with the tuition fees. “I could work in the cafeteria,” he was saying, “or maybe off-campus. I don’t know which.” Then he heard his mother and looked over at her.
“It’s about your father,” Pearl said.
Jenny said, “I’d choose the cafeteria.”
“You know, my darlings,” Pearl told them, “how I always say your father’s away on business.”
“But off-campus they might pay more,” said Cody, “and every penny counts.”
“At the cafeteria you’d be with your classmates, though,” Ezra said.
“Yes, I thought of that.”
“All those coeds,” Jenny said. “Cheerleaders. Girls in their little white bobby sox.”
“Sweater girls,” Cody said.
“There’s something I want to explain about your father,” Pearl told them.
“Choose the cafeteria,” Ezra said.
“Children?”
“The cafeteria,” they said.
And all three gazed at her coolly, out of gray, unblinking, level eyes exactly like her own.
She dreamed it was her nineteenth birthday and that devilish John Dupree had brought her a tin of chocolates and a burnt-leather ornament for her hair. “Why, John, how cunning! Have a sweet,” she told him. In the dream, it puzzled her to know that John Dupree had been dead for sixty-one years. He was killed in the Argonne Forest by the Huns. She remembered paying a visit of condolence to his mother, who, however, was not receiving guests. “It’s all been a mistake, apparently,” Pearl told John Dupree. And she fastened up her hair with the burnt-leather ornament.
“There’s no question,” Jenny said. “We have to call an ambulance. What’s got into Dr. Vincent? Is he senile?”
“He does all right, for his age,” Ezra said. As usual, he seemed to have missed some central point; even Pearl could see that. Jenny sighed, or perhaps just made some impatient rustling sound with her clothes.
“It’s lucky you called me,” she said. “I come and find everything falling apart.”
“Nothing’s falling apart.”
“And why is she lying flat? She’s obviously having trouble breathing. Where’s that big green cushion Becky made her?”
Pearl had been skidding through time, for a moment—preparing to go by ambulance to have her arrow wound treated. She was braced for the precarious, tilting trip down the stairs on a stretcher. It was mention of Becky that set her straight. Becky was her grandchild, Jenny’s oldest daughter. “Jenny?” she said.
“How are you feeling?” Jenny asked.
“Is Cody here too?”
Apparently not. Jenny leaned over the bed to give her a kiss. Pearl patted Jenny’s hair and found it badly cut, choppy to the touch, but for once she didn’t scold. (Jenny had lovely thick hair that she tended to ignore, to mistreat, as if looks didn’t really matter.) “It was nice of you to come,” Pearl told her.
“Well goodness, I was worried,” said Jenny. “You’re the only mother we have.”
Pearl felt she had come full circle. “You should have got an extra,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
She didn’t repeat it. She turned her face on the pillow and was overtaken by a sudden jolt of anger. Why hadn’t they arranged for an extra? All those years when she was the only one, the sole support, the lone tall tree in the pasture just waiting for the lightning to strike … well. She seemed to be losing track of her thoughts. “Did you bring the children?” she said.
“Not this time. I left them with Joe.”
Joe? Oh, yes, her husband. “Why isn’t Cody here?” Pearl asked.
“Well, you know,” said Ezra, “it’s always so hard to locate him …”
“We think you should go to the hospital,” Jenny told Pearl.