Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read Online Free

and come inside now.
    Nights, she worked on the house. To look at her —an out-of-date kind of woman, frail boned, deep bosomed, as if those pout-fronted gowns of her girlhood had somehow formed her figure—you would never guess it, but Pearl was clever with tools.
    She patched a crack, glazed a window, replaced two basement stair treads. She mended a lamp switch and painted the kitchen cupboards. Even in the old days, she had done such things; Beck was not very handy. “This whole, entire house is resting on my shoulders,” she would tel him, and she meant it as an accusation; but the thought was also reassuring, in a way.
    She knew that she was competent. From early in their marriage, from the moment she had realized how often they would be moving, she had concentrated on making each house perfect—airtight and rustproof and waterproof. She dropped the effort of continual y meeting new neighbors, and she stopped returning (freshly fil ed) the cake tins they brought over when she arrived. Al she cared about was sealing up the house, as if for a hurricane. She woke nights wondering if the basement were dry, and went down barefoot to make sure. She couldn’t enjoy their Sunday outings because the house might have burned to the ground in her absence. (how vividly she could picture their return! There’d be an open space where the house used to stand, and a tattered hole for the basement.) Here in Baltimore, she gathered, she was thought to be unfriendly, even spooky—the witch of Calvert Street. What a notion!
    She’d known such witches in her childhood; she was nothing like them.
    Al she wanted was to be al owed to get on with what mattered: calk the windows; weatherstrip the door.
    With tools she was her true self, capable and strong. She felt an indulgent kind of scorn for her children, who had not inherited her skil . Cody lacked the patience, Ezra was inept, Jenny too flighty. It was remarkable, Pearl thought, how people displayed their characters in every little thing they undertook.
    Hammering down a loose floorboard, with a bristle of nails in her mouth, she would let time slip away from her. It would get to be ten-thirty or eleven. Her children would be standing in the doorway al sweaty and grass stained, blinking in the sudden brightness. “Heavens! Get to bed,” she told them.
    “I thought I cal ed you in hours ago.” But a while after they left she’d start to feel deserted, even though they hadn’t been much company. She would lay aside her hammer and rise and walk the house, smoothing her skirt, absently touching her hair where it was fal ing out of its bun. Up the stairs to the hal , past the little room where Jenny slept, and into her own room, with its buckling cardboard wardrobe streaked to look like wood grain, the bare-topped bureau, the cavernous bed. Then out again and up more stairs to the boys’ room, a third-floor dormitory that smel ed of heat.
    The trustful sound of her sons’ breathing made her envious.
    She turned and descended the stairs, al the way down to the kitchen. The back door stood open and the screen door fluttered with moths. Neighboring houses rang with someone’s laughter, a few cracked notes from a trumpet, an out-of-tune piano playing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” She closed the door and locked it and pul ed down the paper shade.
    She climbed the stairs once more and took off her clothing, piece by piece, and put on her nightgown and went to bed.
    She dreamed he wore that aftershave that he’d used when they were courting. She hadn’t smel ed it in years, hadn’t given it a thought, but now it came back to her distinctly—something pungent, prickled with spice. A swaggery and self-vaunting scent, she had known even then; but catching wind of it, when he arrived on Uncle Seward’s front porch to pick her up, she had felt adventurous. She had flung the door open so widely that it banged against the wal , and he had laughed and said,

    “Wel , now. Hey, now,” as