The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [109]
“No. I’d rather not come over there.”
“Well we got ourselves an impasse, then,” he said. “I don’t want to go to a restaurant, myself. I don’t ever do that. So we’ve got a failure of the meeting of minds.”
“I know what we’ll do,” I said. “I just had an idea. Why don’t you come over here and meet my parents? I’ll invite them, too. You know, like how the in-laws meet when their kids get married? The grandparents, now. Just ’cause Oscar’s dead doesn’t change that. What d’you think?”
I had outfoxed him and he knew it. “It’s your side I want to hear, not theirs,” he said, all of a sudden somber.
“You’ll get mine and theirs.”
“I was never much for relatives,” the Bat said, “of the conversational variety.”
“But that’s what I am.”
“Oh all right,” he said angrily, like I’d been beating him at a game. “Invite your parents if you want to. Sure, I’d be happy to meet them.”
I had sudden shooting pains in my stomach, which the Bat was causing just by talking to me.
“So,” he said. “When should I come? How about tonight?”
“I have to work,” I said. “It’s too soon.”
“You don’t think much of me, do you?” he asked me suddenly, a question I wasn’t about to answer.
“You’re fine,” I said. “I don’t think of you one way or another.”
He cleared his throat, an awful sound. “Sorry,” he said. “I got this thing caught in my throat. So, how about Saturday night?”
“Well, I’ll call my parents and then call you back.”
“You do that. I will wait right here by the telephone for that callback from you.”
I called my parents, reached my mom, who was overjoyed that I was inviting her and delighted to be meeting Oscar’s father, and I called the Bat again. So as a plan it was accomplished.
I bought bags of potato chips, and pop, and beer, and some potato salad, and hamburgers, and the hamburger buns, and the ketchup and relish and pickles. Good-time food. It wasn’t a picnic but I figured picnic food would put everybody into a better disposition and help them get along with one another.
I guess I should have been afraid, but it didn’t occur to me to be, with my parents there.
That night it snowed, this being December, and I’d invited my parents early, but they didn’t come when they were supposed to. I kept checking my watch as I buttered the buns. It was one of those best-laid-plans deals. When the phone rang, sure enough, it was my dad saying they had slid off the road and had to call a tow truck, and they’d be there eventually, but they were going to be late. “Delayed” was the word he used. And had I seen the snow, my dad asked, how it was coming down?
That was about when I heard the Bat’s knock on the door. With this building, there’s a front door that’s supposed to be locked, but no one ever keeps it locked, they’ve always got bricks propped against it. Anyone can get in. Anyone did. And he was knocking at my door right now.
No point in looking through the peephole. You didn’t need Mrs. Maggaroulian to tell you what was on the other side. The only thing was, when I opened the door, he didn’t look bad or mean, but more like a loser standing in line at the unemployment office, humbled, ready to ask the passers-by for a quarter.
He had a layer of snow on his head. Snow was on his shoes. And he was, all over again, small. I kept expecting Oscar’s father to look like Oscar, but instead he was a miniature, shorter than me, and the only feature Oscar’d got from him was a sort of cheekbone thing, which, for a second, made me homesick for my late husband. The Bat was holding a tallboy, and he didn’t look sure of himself. Carrying a beer? What had happened to his promise to swear off the alcohol? He was half-smiling, almost panting with the effort of it, wearing a jacket, a wrinkled necktie, and snowy shoes.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi there, daughter.” His voice rasped and rattled. He moved from foot to foot. “You gonna invite me in?”
“Sure,” I said. I helped him out of his jacket and hung it in the closet. He kept his cap on. I turned around and walked back toward where the three chairs were and the hideabed. I heard him