Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

feelings.

“Yet I believe,” he said, appearing to choose his words, “that you yourself have been divorced, have you not?”

“Twice,” said Jenny. She giggled, but he only looked worried. “And once for Joe here,” she added.

Her husband smiled at her from the sofa.

“If I hadn’t had the foresight to keep my maiden name,” Jenny said, “my medical diploma would read like one of those address books where people have moved a lot. Names crossed out and added, crossed out and added — a mess! Dr. Jenny Marie Tull Baines Wiley St. Ambrose.”

The priest was one of those very blond men with glasslike hair, and his color was so high that Jenny wondered about his blood pressure. Or maybe he was just embarrassed. “Well,” he said. “Mrs., um — or Dr. —”

“Tull.”

“Dr. Tull, I only thought that the … instability, the lack of stability, might be causing Slevin’s problems. The turnover in fathers, you might say.”

“In fathers? What are you talking about?” Jenny asked. “Slevin’s not my son. He’s Joe’s.”

“Ah?”

“Joe is his father and always has been.”

“Oh, excuse me,” said the priest.

He grew even pinker — as well he ought, Jenny felt; for slow, plump Slevin with his ashy hair was obviously Joe’s. Jenny was small and dark; Joe a massive, blond, bearded bear of a man with Slevin’s slanted blue eyes. (She had often felt drawn to overweight men. They made her feel tidy.) “Slevin,” she told the priest, “is Joe’s by Greta, his previous wife, and so are most of the others you see here. All except for Becky; Becky’s mine. The other six are his.” She bent to take the dog’s bone from the baby. “Anyway … but Joe’s wife, Greta: she left.”

“Left,” said the priest.

“Left me flat,” Joe said cheerfully. “Cleared clean out of Baltimore. Parked the kids with a neighbor one day, while I was off at work. Hired an Allied van and departed with all we owned, everything but the children’s clothes in neat little piles on the floor.”

“Oh, my stars,” said the priest.

“Even took their beds. Can you explain that? Took the crib and the changing table. Only thing I can figure, she was so used to life with children that she really couldn’t imagine; really assumed she would need a crib no matter where she went. First thing I had to do when I got home that night was go out and buy a fleet of beds from Sears. They must’ve thought I was opening a motel.”

“Picture it,” Jenny said. “Joe in an apron. Joe mixing Similac. Well, he was lost, of course. Utterly lost. The way we met: he called me at home in the dead of night when his baby got roseola. That’s how out of touch he was; it’s been twenty years at least since pediatricians made house calls. But I came, I don’t know why. Well, he lived only two blocks away. And he was so desperate — answered the door in striped pajamas, jiggling the baby—”

“I fell in love with her the moment she walked in,” said Joe. He stroked his beard; golden frizz flew up around his stubby fingers.

“He thought I was Lady Bountiful,” Jenny said, “bearing a medical bag instead of a basket of food. It’s hard to resist a man who needs you.”

“Need had nothing to do with it,” Joe told her.

“Well, who admires you, then. He asked if I had children of my own, and how I managed while I worked. And when I said I mostly played it by ear, with teen-aged sitters one minute and elderly ladies the next, my mother filling in when she could or my brother or a neighbor, or Becky sometimes just camping in my waiting room with her math assignment—”

“I could see she wasn’t a skimpy woman,” Joe told the priest. “Not rigid. Not constricted. Not that super- serious kind.”

“No,” said the priest, glancing around him. (It hadn’t been a day when Jenny could get to the housework.)

Jenny said, “He said he liked the way I let his children crawl all over me. He said his wife had found them irritating, the last few years. Well, you see how it began. I had promised myself I’d never remarry, Becky and I would rather manage on our own, that’s what I was best at; but I don’t know, there Joe was, and his children. And his baby was so little and so recently abandoned that she turned her head and opened her mouth when I held her horizontal; you could tell she still remembered. Anyway,” she said, and she smiled at the priest, who really was shockingly young — a wide-eyed boy, was all. “How did we get on this subject?”

“Uh, Slevin,” said the priest. “We were discussing Slevin.”

“Oh, yes, Slevin.”

It was a rainy, blowy April afternoon, with the trees turning inside out and beating against the windowpanes, and the living room had reached just that shade of dusk where no one had realized, quite yet, that it was time to switch on the lights. The air seemed thick and grainy. The children were winding down like little clocks and fussing for their suppers; but the priest, lacking children of his own, failed to notice this. He leaned forward, setting his fingertips together. “I’ve been concerned,” he said, “by Slevin’s behavior at C.Y.O. meetings. He’s not sociable at all, has no friends, seems moody, withdrawn. Of course it could be his age, but … he’s fourteen, is he?”

“Thirteen,” said Joe, after thinking it over.

“Thirteen years old, naturally a difficult … I wouldn’t even mention it, except that when I suggested we have a talk he just wrenched away and ran out, and never returned. Now we notice that you, Mr. St. Ambrose, that you drop him off for mass every Sunday, but in fact he’s stopped coming inside and simply sits out front on the steps and watches the traffic. He’s, you might say, playing hooky, but—”

“Shoot,” said Joe. “I get up specially on a Sunday morning to drive him there and he plays hooky?”

“But my point is—”

“I don’t know why he wants to go anyhow. He’s the only one of them that does.”

“But it’s his withdrawn behavior that worries me,” the priest said, “more than his church attendance. Though it might not be a bad idea if, perhaps, you accompanied him to mass sometime.”

“Me? Hell, I’m not even Catholic.”

“Or I don’t suppose you, Dr. Tull …”

Both men seemed to be waiting for her. Jenny was wondering about the baby’s diaper, which bulged suspiciously, but she gathered her thoughts and said, “Oh, no, goodness, I really wouldn’t have the faintest—” She laughed, covering her mouth — a gesture she had. “Besides,” she said, “it was Greta who was the Catholic. Slevin’s mother.”

“I see. Well, the important thing—”

“I don’t know why Slevin goes to church. And to Greta’s church, her old one, clear across town.”

“Does he communicate with his mother now?”

“Oh, no, she’s never been back. Got a quickie divorce in Idaho and that’s the last we heard.”

“Are there any, ah, step-family problems?”

“Step-family?” Jenny said. “Well, no. Or yes. I don’t know. There would be, probably; of course these things are never easy … only life is so rushed around here, there really isn’t time.”

“Slevin is very fond of Jenny,” Joe told the priest.

“Why, thank you, honey,” Jenny said.

“She won him right over; she’s got him trailing after her anyplace she goes. She’s so cool and jokey with kids, you know.”

“Well, I try,” Jenny said. “I do make an effort. But you never can be sure. That age is very secretive.”

“Perhaps I’ll suggest that he stop by and visit me,” the priest said.

“If you like.”

“Just to gab, I’ll say, chew the fat …”

Jenny could see that it would never work out.