Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read Online Free Page B

heard that scary noise.
    She’d kept the furnace stoked with coal, confronted the neighborhood bul y when Ezra got beaten up, hosed the roof during Mrs.

    Simmons’s chimney fire. And when Cody came home drunk from some girl’s birthday party, who had to deal with that? Pearl Tul , who’d never taken anything stronger than a glass of wine at Christmas. She sat him smartly in a kitchen chair, ignored his groans, leaned across the table to him—
    and couldn’t think of a thing to say.
    Then Cody graduated from high school, and Ezra was a sophomore, and Jenny was a tal young lady in eighth grade. Beck would not have known them.
    And they, perhaps, would not have known Beck. They never asked about him. Didn’t that show how little importance a father has? The invisible man. The absent presence. Pearl felt a twinge of angry joy.
    Apparently she had carried this off—made the transition so smoothly that not a single person guessed. It was the greatest triumph of her life.
    My one true accomplishment, she thought. (what a pity there was no one to whom she could boast of it.) Without noticing, even, she had gradual y stopped attending the Baptist church. She stopped referring to Beck in conversation—although stil , writing her Christmas cards to relatives in Raleigh, she remarked that Beck was doing wel and sent them his regards.
    One night, she threw away his letters. It wasn’t a planned decision. She was just cleaning her bureau, was al , and couldn’t think of any good reason to save them. She sat by her bedroom wastebasket and dropped in looks like I wil be moving up the ladder and little place convenient to the railway station and told me I was doing mighty wel . There weren’t very many —three or so in the past year. When had she quit ripping open the envelopes with shaking hands and rapidly, greedily scanning the lines? It occurred to her that the man she stil mourned, late on sleepless nights, bore no relation whatsoever to the man who sent these tiresome messages. Ed Bal is retiring in June, she read with infinite boredom, and I step into his territory which has the highest per capita income in Delaware. It was a great satisfaction to her that he had misspel ed capita.
    Her children grew up and embarked on lives of their own.
    Her sons started helping out financial y, and Pearl was glad to accept. (she had never been ashamed about taking money—from Uncle Seward in the olden days, or from Beck, or now from the boys.
    Where she came from, a woman expected the men to provide.) And when Cody became so successful, he bought the row house she’d been renting al these years and presented her with the deed one Christmas morning. She could have retired from the grocery store right then, but she put it off til her sight began failing. What else would she do with her time?

    “Empty nest,” they cal ed it. Nowadays, that was the term they used. It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had not been empty.
    Relatively speaking, it was nothing—empty far longer than ful . So much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they’d been with her?
    When she thought of them in their various stages—first clinging to her, then separating and drifting off—she thought of the hal lamp she used to leave on so they wouldn’t be scared in the dark. Then later she’d left just the bathroom light on, further down the hal of whatever house they’d been living in; and later stil just the downstairs light if one of them was out for the evening.
    Their growing up amounted, therefore, to a gradual dimming of the light at her bedroom door, as if they took some radiance with them as they moved away from her.
    She should have planned for it better, she sometimes thought.
    She should have made a few friends or joined a club.
    But she wasn’t the type. It wouldn’t have consoled her.
    Last summer, she’d been half-awakened by a hymn on her clock