Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read Online Free PDF Page B

funeral.” There was a thrumming silence, as if she had said a bad word. Then Ezra said, “Funeral, Mother?
    You’re not dying?”
    “No, of course not,” she assured him. “But someday,” she said craftily. “Just in the eventuality, you see…”
    “Let’s not talk about it,” he said.
    She paused, assembling patience. What did he expect—
    that she’d go on forever? It was so tiring. But that was Ezra for you. “Al I’m saying,” she said, “is I’d like those people invited. Are you listening? The people in my address book.” Ezra didn’t answer.
    “The address book in my stationery drawer.”
    “Stationery drawer,” Ezra echoed.

    Good; he’d got it. He flicked a magazine page, said nothing further, but she knew he’d got it.
    She thought of how that address book must have aged by now—smel ing mousy, turning brittle. It dated back to long before her sight had started dimming.
    Emmaline was in it, and Emmaline had been dead for twenty years or more. So was Mrs. Simmons dead, down in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Uncle Seward’s widow and perhaps his daughter too.
    Why, everybody in that book was six feet under, she supposed, except for Beck.
    She remembered that he took a whole page— one town after another crossed out. She’d kept it up to date because she’d imagined needing to cal him in an emergency. What emergency had she had in mind?
    She couldn’t think of any that would be eased in the slightest by his presence. She’d like to see his face when he received an invitation to her funeral. An “invite,” he would cal it. “Imagine that!” he would say, shocked. “She left me first, after al .
    Here’s this invite to her funeral.” She could hear him now.
    She laughed.

    The doctor came, stamping his feet. “Is it snowing out?” she asked him.
    “Snowing? No.”
    “You were stamping your feet.”
    “No,” he said, “it’s just cold.” He settled on the edge of her bed. “Feels like my toes are fal ing off,” he told her. “My knee bones say we’re going to have a frost tonight.” She waved away the smal talk. “Listen here,” she said.
    “Ezra cal ed you over by mistake.”
    “Is that so.”
    “I’m real y feeling fine. Maybe earlier I was under the weather, but now I’m much improved.”
    “I see,” he said. He took her wrist in his icy, wrinkled fingers. (he was nearly as old as she was, and had al but given up his practice.)
    He held it for what seemed to be several minutes.
    Then he said, “How long has this been going on?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Where’s the phone?” he asked Ezra.

    “Wait! Dr. Vincent! Wait!” Pearl cried.
    He had laid down her wrist, but now he set his hand on hers and she felt him leaning over her, breathing pipe tobacco. “Yes?” he said.
    “I’m not going to any hospital.”
    “Of course you’re going.”
    She spoke clearly, maybe a little too loudly, directing her voice toward the ceiling.
    “Now, I’ve thought this through,” she told him. “I don’t want those crank-up beds and professional smel s. It would kil me.”
    “Dear lady—his “And you know they wouldn’t be able to give me penicil in.”
    “Penicil in, no…”
    “That’s what I took in forty-three.”
    “Don’t tire yourself,” the doctor said. “I remember al about it.”
    Or maybe it was ‘44. But Beck had not yet left. He’d been away on a business trip, and brought back an archery set for the children. The things he spent his money on! When they were never wel off, in the best of times. He took the set on their Sunday drive to a field outside the city—nailed the canvas target to a tree trunk. Oh, he never gave a thought to danger. He was not the type to lie awake nights listing al that could go wrong. Wel , anyway. She couldn’t say just how it had happened (she was arranging a bouquet of winter grasses at the time, as she no longer partook in sports), but somehow, she got hit. It was Cody who drew