Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [57]
“The what?” said Ezra.
“The nightingales.”
“Nightingales? In New Jersey?”
“Of course,” she said. “Also we liked the shopping. In particular, Korvette’s. My husband likes the … how do you say? Drip and dry suits.”
The sick man moaned and tossed, nearly dislodging a tube that entered the back of his wrist. His wife, an ancient, papery lady, leaned toward him and stroked his hand. She murmured something, and then she turned to the younger woman. Ezra saw that she was crying. She didn’t attempt to hide it but wept openly, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah,” the younger woman said, and she left Ezra’s side and bent over the wife. She gathered her up in her arms as she’d gathered the child earlier. Ezra knew he should leave, but he didn’t. Instead he turned and gazed out the window, slightly tilting his head and looking nonchalant, as some men do when they have rung a doorbell and are standing on the porch, waiting to be noticed and invited in.
Ezra’s sister, Jenny, sat at the desk in her old bedroom, reading a battered textbook. She was strikingly pretty, even in reading glasses and the no-color quilted bathrobe she always left on a closet hook for her visits home. Ezra stopped at her doorway and peered in. “Jenny?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d take a breather,” she said. She removed her glasses and gave him a blurry, unfocused look.
“It isn’t semester break yet, is it?”
“Semester break! Do you think medical students have time for such things?”
“No, well,” he said.
But lately she’d been home more often than not, it appeared to him. And she never mentioned Harley, her husband. She hadn’t referred to him once all fall, and maybe even all summer. “It’s my opinion she’s left him,” Ezra’s mother had said recently. “Oh, don’t act so surprised! It must have crossed your mind. Here she suddenly moves to a new address—closer to the school, she claims—and then can’t have us to visit, anytime I offer; always too busy or preparing for some quiz, and when I call, you notice, it’s never Harley who answers, never once Harley who picks up the phone. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? But I’m unable to broach the subject. I mean, she deflects me, if you know what I mean. Somehow I just never … you could, though. She always did feel closer to you than to me or Cody. Won’t you just ask her what’s what?”
But now when he lounged in the doorway, trying to find some way to sidle into a conversation, Jenny put her glasses back on and returned to her book. He felt dismissed. “Um,” he said. “How are things in Paulham?”
“Fine,” she said, eyes scanning the print.
“Harley all right?”
There was a deep, studious silence.
“It doesn’t seem we ever get to see him any more,” Ezra said.
“He’s okay,” Jenny said.
She turned a page.
Ezra waited a while longer, and then he straightened up from the doorway and went downstairs. He found his mother in the kitchen, unpacking groceries. “Well?” she asked him.
“Well, what?”
“Did you talk to Jenny?”
“Ah …”
She still had her coat on; she thrust her hands in her pockets and faced him squarely, with her bun slipping down the back of her head. “You promised me,” she told him. “You swore you’d talk to her.”
“I didn’t swear to, Mother.”
“You took a solemn oath,” she told him.
“I notice she still wears a ring,” he said hopefully.
“So what,” said his mother. She went back to her groceries.
“She wouldn’t wear a ring if she and Harley were separated, would she?”
“She would if she wanted to fool us.”
“Well, I don’t know, if she wants to fool us maybe we ought to act fooled. I don’t know.”
“All my life,” his mother said, “people have been trying to shut me out. Even my children. Especially my children. If I so much as ask that girl how she’s been, she shies away like I’d inquired into the deepest, darkest part of her. Now, why should she be so standoffish?”
Ezra said, “Maybe she cares more about what you think than what outsiders think.”
“Ha,” said his mother. She lifted a carton of eggs from the grocery bag.