Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [94]
“It’s not!” he said. His voice was unusually high; he sounded like a much younger child. “It isn’t! Look at it! Why, it’s like a … concentration camp person, a victim, Anne Frank! It’s terrible! It’s so sad!”
Surprised, she turned the photo around and looked again. True, the picture wasn’t particularly happy—it showed a dark little girl with a thin, watchful face—but it wasn’t as bad as all that. “So what?” she asked, and she held it out to him once more. He drew back sharply.
“It’s somebody else,” he told her. “Not you; you’re always laughing and having fun. It’s not you.”
“Oh, fine, it’s not me, then,” she said, and she returned to the rest of the photos.
“I want to talk to you about that oldest boy,” her mother said on the phone. “What’s his name? Kevin?”
“Slevin, Mother. Honestly.”
“Well, he stole my vacuum cleaner.”
“He did what?”
“Sunday afternoon, when you all came to visit, he slipped into my pantry and made off with my Hoover upright.”
Jenny sat down on her bed. She said, “Let me get this straight.”
“It’s been missing all week,” her mother said, “and I couldn’t understand it. I knew we hadn’t been burglarized, and even if we had, what would anyone want with my old Hoover?”
“But why accuse Slevin?”
“My neighbor told me, just this afternoon. Mrs. Arthur. Said, Was that your grandson I saw Sunday? Kind of hefty boy? Loading your Hoover upright into your daughter’s car trunk?’ ”
“That’s impossible,” Jenny said.
“Now, how do you know that? How do you know what is or is not possible? He’s hardly more than a stranger, Jenny. I mean, you got those children the way other people get weekend guests.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Jenny told her.
“Well, all I ask is for you to go check Slevin’s bedroom. Just check.”
“What, this minute?”
“There’s lint specks all over my carpet.”
“Oh, all right,” Jenny said.
She laid the receiver on her pillow and climbed from the second floor to the third. Slevin’s door was open and he wasn’t in his room, although his radio rocked with the Jefferson Airplane. She stepped stealthily over Slevin’s knapsack, avoided a teetering pile of Popular Science magazines, opened his closet door, and found herself staring at her mother’s vacuum cleaner. She would know it anywhere: an elderly machine with a gray cloth dust bag. Its cord was coiled neatly and it seemed unharmed. If he’d taken it apart to learn how it worked, she might have understood. Or if he’d smashed it, out of some rage toward her mother. But there it sat, entire. She stood puzzling over it for several seconds. Then she wheeled it out of the closet and lugged it down the stairs, to where her mother’s voice was twanging impatiently from the receiver. “Jenny? Jenny?”
“Well, you’re right,” Jenny said. “I found it in his room.”
There was a pause in which Pearl could have said, “I told you so,” but kindly did not. Then she said, “I wonder if he might be calling for help in some way.”
“By stealing a vacuum cleaner?”
“He’s really a very sweet boy,” Pearl said. “I can see that. Maybe he’s asking for a psychologist or some such.”
“More likely he’s asking for a neater house,” Jenny said. “The dust balls on his closet floor have started raising a family.”
She pictured Slevin, in desperation, stealing an arsenal of cleaning supplies—this neighbor’s broom, that neighbor’s Ajax, gathered with the same feverish zeal he showed in collecting Indian head pennies. She was attacked by a sudden sputter of laughter.
“Oh, Jenny,” her mother said sadly. “Do you have to see everything as a joke?”
“It’s not my fault if funny things happen,” Jenny said.
“It most certainly is,” said her mother, but instead of explaining herself, she all at once grew brisk and requested the return of her vacuum cleaner by tomorrow morning.
Jenny and Joe and every child except the baby were watching television. It was long past bedtime for most of them, but this was a special occasion: the Late, Late Show was A Taste of Honey. Everyone in the house had heard of A Taste of Honey. It was Jenny’s all-time favorite movie. She had seen