Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [51]
“No, wait,” Jenny said. Her heart was beating so fast, it seemed she was vibrating where she stood.
“Visiting for no apparent reason,” said Pearl, “and slipping away this morning to meet him like a tramp, some cheap little tramp—”
“Mother, you’ve got it wrong!” Jenny told her. “It’s nothing, don’t you see?” She felt she had run out of breath. Gasping for air, she gestured toward Josiah, who merely stood there with his mouth agape. “He just … we just met in the hall and … it’s not that way at all, he’s nothing to me, don’t you see?”
But she had to say this to Pearl’s back, hurrying after her through the dining room. Pearl reached their table and said, “Ezra, I cannot stay here.”
Ezra stood up. “Mother?”
“I simply cannot,” she said. She gathered up her coat and walked away.
“But what happened?” Ezra asked, turning to Jenny. “What’s bothering her?”
Cody said, “That lukewarm soup, no doubt,” and he rocked back comfortably in his chair with a cigar between his teeth.
“I wish just once,” Ezra said, “we could eat a meal from start to finish.”
“I don’t feel well,” Jenny told him.
In fact, her lips were numb. It was a symptom she seemed to remember from before, from some long-forgotten moment, or maybe from a nightmare.
She left her coat behind, and she rushed through the dining room and out to the street. At first, she thought her mother had disappeared. Then she found her, half a block ahead—a militant figure walking briskly. Oh, what if she wouldn’t even turn around? Or worse, would turn and lash out, slap, snap, her clawed pearl ring, her knowing face … But Jenny ran to catch up with her, anyway. “Mother,” she said.
In the light from the liquor store window, she saw her mother reassemble her expression—take on a cool, unperturbed look.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Jenny told her. “I’m not a tramp! I’m not cheap! Mother, listen to me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Pearl said politely.
“Of course it matters!”
“You’re over twenty-one. If you don’t know good from bad by now, there’s nothing more I can do about it.”
“I felt sorry for him,” Jenny said.
They crossed a street and started up the next block.
“He told me his mother had died,” Jenny said.
They veered around a gang of teen-aged boys.
“She was all he had—his father’s dead too. She was the center of his life.”
“Well,” said Pearl, “I suppose it can’t have been easy for her.”
“I don’t know how he’s going to manage now she’s gone.”
“I believe I saw her in the grocery once,” said Pearl. “A brown-haired woman?”
“Plumpish, sort of.”
“Full in the face?”
“Like a wood thrush,” Jenny said.
“Oh, Jenny,” said her mother, and she gave a little laugh. “The things you come up with, sometimes!”
They passed the candy store, and then the pharmacy. Jenny and her mother fell into step. They passed the fortune-teller’s window. The same dusty lamp glowed on the table. Jenny, looking in, thought that Mrs. Parkins had not been much of a prophet. Why, she had even had to listen to the radio for tomorrow’s weather! And she should have guessed from the very first instant, from the briefest, most cursory glance, that Jenny was not capable of being destroyed by love.
4
Heart Rumors
The first few times that Mrs. Scarlatti stayed in the hospital, Ezra had no trouble getting in to visit her. But the last time was harder. “Relative?” the nurse would ask.
“No, ah, I’m her business partner.”
“Sorry, relatives only.”
“But she doesn’t have any relatives. I’m all she’s got. See, she and I own this restaurant together.”
“And what’s that in the jar?”
“Her soup.”
“Soup,” said the nurse.
“I make this soup she likes.”
“Mrs. Scarlatti isn’t keeping things down.”
“I know that, but I wanted to give her something.”
This would earn him a slantwise glance, before he was led brusquely into Mrs. Scarlatti’s room.
In the past, she had chosen to stay in a ward. (She was an extremely social woman.) She’d sit up straight in her dramatic black robe, a batik scarf hiding her hair, and “Sweetie!” she’d say as he entered. For a moment the other women would