Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [39]
Back at the house, the church ladies bustled and clucked and spread cloths over flat surfaces and laid out a ruby-red ham, banquet platters of fried chicken, roasting pans of macaroni and cheese, three-bean salad, warm greens with sliding grey-pink chunks of fatback, two coconut cakes, a chess pie, and one towering, lightly sweating lemon meringue pie. They arranged and rearranged in a serious way, serious about the food and serious about grief (of which there was not much and even Elizabeth could tell that Dr. Hill, refusing to sit down, calmly sipping a cup of tea, was not the kind of mourner the Stewardesses warmed up to), and serious about their role.
Gus Lester uncovered the chicken and sliced the ham in a proprietary way, and when Elizabeth came through to the table, they locked eyes.
Elizabeth said, “Hello, Mr. Lester.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I was wondering if I could have Huddie’s address,” and saw in his face the open wish to do her harm.
Dr. Hill came out of the bedroom holding a neat paper-bag package.
“Here, Elizabeth, this is for you.” She shoved the package into Elizabeth’s hands, and Elizabeth turned it over a few times, wanting to shake it for a clue about the contents, certain that funeral protocol could not be the same as birthday protocol.
“You can open it now if you want. It’s those spoons of hers.”
How many? Elizabeth wondered, and took out the nine spoons and thought that if Dr. Hill did not cry at her mother’s funeral, Elizabeth certainly had no business weeping over spoons she’d tried to steal and the hundreds of cups of tea they’d had and the way in which even Huddie, banished forever, was closer to Elizabeth now than Mrs. Hill would ever be.
“Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. You were very good to my mother and I know that having you around—”
The Stewardesses swarmed around Dr. Hill with plates of food she would have to eat and names of people she would have to thank warmly. They carried her across the room to Reverend Shales and put her in the chair next to him, staying close enough to make an exit impossible. Vivian Hill waved to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth took one last walk through Mrs. Hill’s bedroom. The hatboxes were gone.
* * *
Elizabeth’s father—who did not understand children, who had not understood his wife except to see clearly that he was not the man she should have married, who could not understand how his kindnesses were so often misinterpreted, who would not understand anything at all about love until his third wife’s dyed red hair, big Jewish behind, and wide white hands knocked him into the best part of himself—understood loss. He had grown up comfortably in Brownsville; they had no boarders, they had a small parlor and two bedrooms, and he was allowed to finish high school, during the daytime. He had had a much easier life than his closest friend, Myron Flaverman, whose father cut cloth.
His own father, as reliable as a clock, stopped to pick up the Forward one day at Saratoga and Sutter, as he always did, and a blue Franklin from New Jersey jumped the curb and drove right through