Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [99]
Jenny leaned back against the receptionist’s window and touched a hand to her forehead. “Well, I don’t …” she said. “What did you say this was?”
“A rhinoceros foot,” said the priest, “in the shape of an umbrella stand. Or an umbrella stand in the shape of a rhinoceros foot. It was an actual rhinoceros foot from … wherever rhinoceri come from.”
A naked toddler shot out a door like a stray piece of popcorn, pursued by a nurse with a hypodermic needle. The priest stood back to give them room. “We know it was there in the morning,” he said. “But at four o’clock, it was gone. And Slevin was in just previously; I’d asked him to come for a chat. Only I was on the phone when he arrived. By the time I’d hung up he was gone, and so was the rhinoceros foot.”
Jenny said, “I wonder if his mother had a rhinoceros foot.”
“Pardon?” said the priest.
She realized how this must have sounded, and she laughed. “No,” she said, “I don’t mean she had rhinoceros feet … oh, Lord …”
The priest said, “Dr. Tull, don’t you see this is serious? We have a child in trouble here, don’t you see that? Don’t you think something ought to be done? Where do you stand, Dr. Tull?”
Jenny’s smile faded and she looked into his face. “I don’t know,” she said, after a pause. She felt suddenly bereft, as if something were missing, as if she’d given something up. She hadn’t always been like this! she wanted to tell him. But aloud she said, “I only meant, you see … I believe he steals what reminds him of his mother. Hoovers and umbrella stands. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Ah,” said the priest.
“What’s next, I wonder,” Jenny said. She mused for a moment. “Picture it! Grand pianos. Kitchen sinks. Why, we’ll have his mother’s whole household,” she said, “her photo albums and her grade-school yearbooks, her college roommate asleep on our bed and her high school boyfriends in our living room.” She pictured a row of dressed-up boys from the fifties, their hair slicked down wetly, their shirts ironed crisply, perched on her couch like mannequins with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates on their knees. She laughed. The priest groaned. A little blue plastic helicopter buzzed across the waiting room and landed in Jenny’s hair.
8
This Really Happened
The summer before Luke Tull turned fourteen, his father had a serious accident at the factory he was inspecting. A girder swung around on its cable, hit Luke’s father and the foreman standing next to him, and swept them both off the walkway and down to the lower level of the factory. The foreman was killed. Cody lived, by some miracle, but he was badly hurt. For two days he lay in a coma. There was a question of brain damage, till he woke and, in his normal, crusty way, asked who the hell was in charge around here.
Three weeks later, he came home by ambulance. His thick black hair had been shaved off one side of his head, where a gauze patch covered the worst of his wounds. His face—ordinarily lean and tanned—was swollen across one cheekbone and turning different shades of yellow from slowly fading bruises. His ribs were taped and an arm and a leg were in casts—the right arm and the left leg, so he couldn’t use crutches. He was forced to lie in bed, cursing the game shows on TV. “Fools. Jackasses. Who do they think would be watching this crap?”
Luke’s mother, who had always been so spirited, lost something important to the accident. First, in the terrible coma days, she drifted around in a wash of tears—a small, wan, pink-eyed woman. Her red hair seemed drained of color. Luke would say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t hear, would sometimes snatch up her car keys as if mistaking who had called and go tearing off to the hospital again, leaving Luke alone. Even after the coma ended, it didn’t seem she came back completely. When Cody was brought home, she sat by his bed for hours saying nothing, lightly stroking one thick vein that ran down the inside of his wrist. She watched the game