Read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant for Free Online Page B

her arrow wound treated. She was braced for the precarious, tilting trip down the stairs on a stretcher. It was mention of Becky that set her straight. Becky was her grandchild, Jenny’s oldest daughter. “Jenny?” she said.
    “How are you feeling?” Jenny asked.
    “Is Cody here too?”
    Apparently not. Jenny leaned over the bed to give her a kiss. Pearl patted Jenny’s hair and found it badly cut, choppy to the touch, but for once she didn’t scold. (Jenny had lovely thick hair that she tended to ignore, to mistreat, as if looks didn’t really matter.) “It was nice of you to come,” Pearl told her.
    “Well goodness, I was worried,” said Jenny. “You’re the only mother we have.”
    Pearl felt she had come full circle. “You should have got an extra,” she said.
    “Excuse me?”
    She didn’t repeat it. She turned her face on the pillow and was overtaken by a sudden jolt of anger. Why hadn’t they arranged for an extra? All those years when she was the only one, the sole support, the lone tall tree in the pasture just waiting for the lightning to strike … well. She seemed to be losing track of her thoughts. “Did you bring the children?” she said.
    “Not this time. I left them with Joe.”
    Joe? Oh, yes, her husband. “Why isn’t Cody here?” Pearl asked.
    “Well, you know,” said Ezra, “it’s always so hard to locate him …”
    “We think you should go to the hospital,” Jenny told Pearl.
    “Oh, thank you, dear, but I don’t believe I care to.”
    “You’re not breathing right. Where’s that cushion Becky made when she was little? The one with the uplifting motto,” Jenny said. “
Sleep, o faithful warrior, upon thy carven pillow
.” She gave a little snort of laughter, and Pearl smiled, picturing Jenny’s habit of covering her mouth with her hand as if overcome, as if struck absolutely helpless by life’s silliness. “Anyhow,” Jenny said, pulling herself together. “Ezra,
you
agree with me, don’t you?”
    “Agree?”
    “About the hospital.”
    “Ah …” said Ezra.
    There was a pause. You could pluck this single moment out of all time, Pearl thought, and still discover so much about her children—even about Cody, for his very absence was a characteristic, perhaps his main one. And Jenny was so brisk and breezy but … oh, you might say somewhat opaque, a reflecting surface flashing your own self back at you, giving no hint of
her
self. And Ezra, mild Ezra: no doubt confusedly tugging at the shock of fair hair that hung over his forehead, considering and reconsidering … “Well,” he said, “I don’t know … I mean, maybe if we waited a while …”
    “But how long? How long can we afford to wait?”
    “Oh, maybe just till tonight, or tomorrow …”
    “Tomorrow! What if it’s, say, pneumonia?”
    “Or it could be only a cold, you see.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “And we wouldn’t want her to go if it makes her unhappy.”
    “No, but—”
    Pearl listened, smiling. She knew the outcome now. They would deliberate for hours, echoing each other’s answers, repeating and rephrasing questions, evading, retreating, arguing for argument’s sake, ultimately going nowhere. “You never did face up to things,” she said kindly.
    “Mother?”
    “You always were duckers and dodgers.”
    “Dodgers?”
    She smiled again, and closed her eyes.
    It was such a relief to drift, finally. Why had she spent so long learning how? The traffic sounds—horns and bells and rags of music—flowed around the voices in her room. She kept mislaying her place in time, but it made no difference; all she remembered was equally pleasant. She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights—how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses. How a sleeping baby weighs so heavily on your shoulder, like ripe fruit. What privacy it is to walk in the rain beneath the drip and crackle of your own umbrella. She remembered a country auction she’d