Страница 6 из 25
"It all looks the same," I murmur.
"It is and it isn't," Dad replies.
"What do you mean?"
"You'll see."
My parents still live in the same house in which they raised me. While other young professionals moved on to newer subdivisions, restored Victorian gingerbreads, or even antebellum palaces downtown, my father clung stubbornly to the ash-paneled library he'd appended to the suburban tract house he bought in 1963. Whenever my mother got the urge to move to more stately mansions, he added to the existing structure, giving her the space she claimed we needed and a decorating project on which to expend her fitful energies.
As the BMW pulls up to the house, I imagine my mother waiting inside. She always wanted me to succeed in the larger world, but it broke her heart when Sarah and I settled in Houston. Seven hours is too far to drive on a regular basis, and Mom dislikes flying. Still, the tie between us is such that distance means little. When I was a boy, people always told me I was like my father, that I'd "got my father's brain." But it is my mother who has the rare combination of quantitative aptitude and intuitive imagination that I was lucky enough to inherit.
Dad shuts off the engine and unstraps A
"Who else is here?"
"Wait and see," Dad says cryptically.
I carry two suitcases to the porch, then go back for A
"Welcome home," she whispers in my ear. She pulls back, her hands gripping my upper arms, and looks hard at me. "You're still not eating. Are you all right?"
"I don't know. A
She squeezes my arms with a strength I have never seen fail. "That's what grandmothers are for. Everything's going to be all right. Starting right this minute."
At sixty-three my mother is still beautiful, but not with the delicate comeliness that fills so many musket-and-magnolia romances. Beneath the ta
"Mom, what's wrong? On the phone-"
"Shh. We'll talk later." She blinks back tears, then pushes me into the house and takes A
A
"There's somebody waiting to see you, Pe
I pull the suitcases inside. A wide doorway in the foyer leads to the dining room, and I stop dead when I see who is there. Standing beside the long table is a black woman as tall as I and fifty years older. Her mouth is set in a tight smile, and her eyes twinkle with joy.
"Ruby!" I cry, setting the bags on the floor and walking toward her. "What in the world…?"
"Today's her day off," Mom explains from behind me. "I called to check on her, and when she heard you were coming, she demanded that Tom come get her so she could see you."
"And that grandbaby," Ruby says, pointing at A
I hug the old woman gently. It's like hugging a bundle of sticks. Ruby Flowers came to work for us in 1963 and, except for one life-threatening illness, never missed a single workday until arthritis forced her to slow down thirty years later. Even then she begged my father to give her steroid injections to allow her to keep doing her "heavy work"-the ironing and scrubbing-but he refused. Instead he kept her on at full pay but limited her to sorting socks, washing the odd load of clothes, and watching the soaps on television.
"I'm sorry about your wife," Ruby says. " 'Cept for losing a child, that the hardest thing."
I give her an extra squeeze.
"Now, let me see that baby. Come here, child!"
I wonder if A
"I cooked your daddy his favorite di
At the center of the table sits a plate heaped with chicken shallow-fried to a peppered gold. I've watched Ruby make that chicken a thousand times and never once use more than salt, pepper, flour, and Crisco. With those four ingredients she creates a flavor and texture that Harland Sanders couldn't touch with his best pressure cooker. I snatch up a wing and take a bite of white meat. Crispy outside and moist within, it bursts in my mouth with intoxicating familiarity.
"Go slap your daddy's hand!" Ruby cries, and A
"I'll get the tea," Mom says, heading for the kitchen before Ruby can start. "Make your plate, Ruby. Tonight you're a guest."
Our family says grace only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then almost as a formality. But with Ruby present, no one dares reach for a fork.
"Would you like to return thanks, Ruby?" Dad asks.
The old woman shakes her head, her eyes shining with mischief. "I wish you'd do it, Dr. Cage. You give a fine blessing."
Thirty-eight years of practicing medicine has stripped my father of the stern religious carapace grafted onto him in the Baptist churches of his youth. But when pressed, he can deliver a blessing that vies with the longest-winded of deacons for flowery language and detail. He seems about to deliver one of these, with tongue-in-cheek overtones added for my benefit, but my mother halts him with a touch of her hand. She bows her head, and everyone at the table follows suit.
"Father," she says, "it's been far too long since we've given thanks to you in this house. Tonight we thank you for the return of our son, who has been away too long. We give thanks for A
I take A
"We don't pretend to understand death here," Mom continues softly. "We ask only that you let this young family heal, and be reconciled to their loss. This is a house of love, and we humbly ask grace in thy name's sake. Amen."
As we echo the "amen," Dad and I look at each other across the table, moved by my mother's passion but not its object. In matters religious I am my father's son, having no faith in a just God, or any god at all if you shake me awake at four a.m. and put the question to me. There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah's death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where patients or family members often asked outright if I was saved. I always smiled and nodded so as to avoid a philosophical argument that would benefit no one, and wondered if the question was an eccentricity of Southern hospitals. In the Pacific Northwest they probably offer you crystals or lists of alternative healers. I have no regrets about letting Sarah raise A