Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

called.
    Min Foo came down the passageway, rustling and jingling. “Hi, everybody,” she said. “Oh, you’re eating.” She gave off the clinical smell of vinyl-upholstered waiting rooms and isopropyl alcohol.
    “How was your checkup?” Rebecca asked.
    “Dr. Fielding says I’m too fat.”
    “I’m sure he didn’t put it
that
way,” Rebecca said. “Won’t you have a sandwich?”
    “Mom! I say I’m too fat and you offer me something to eat. Finish up, kids; we’re late for your play date.”
    “Can I pour you some milk? Skim, I mean,” Rebecca said.
    “No, thanks. We’d better hit the road.”
    “Try driving a car when your ankles don’t bend,” Poppy piped up.
    “What, Poppy?” Min Foo turned to Rebecca. “I was thinking about your dream,” she said.
    “My dream,” Rebecca echoed. In the flurry of lunch, she had started to forget her dream. Now it came back to her, but with the boy more distant now, more of an
other.
“What about it?” she asked Min Foo.
    “If you dreamed you had a son, not daughters, and if the son was blond, not dark . . .” Min Foo was shepherding the children toward the front of the house, so that Rebecca had to follow her. “Well, it seems to me,” she said, “that you were dreaming how things would be if you’d chosen a different fork in the road. You know what I mean? If you’d decided on some different kind of life than you have now.”
    This struck Rebecca as so apt, and so immediately obvious where it hadn’t been before, that she stopped short. Oh, her girls could surprise her so, every now and then!
    “Anyway,” Min Foo was saying, “thanks for keeping the children. Kids, tell Gram goodbye.”
    Rebecca said, “Wait!” But then the telephone rang, and she had to turn back to the kitchen.
    Poppy, who never answered the phone even when he was sitting right next to it, looked up at her from a spoonful of strawberry jam. Rebecca glared at him and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” she said.
    “Mrs. Davitch?”
    “Yes.”
    “This is Katie Border’s mother. The graduation party?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Well, here’s the problem: our daughter didn’t graduate.”
    “Didn’t graduate!”
    “Can you believe it? The little minx: she never said a word. And whatever notification the school might have sent us, I guess she intercepted. So this morning I was hanging out her dress—the ceremony was set for three, her dad had arranged to come home early, both sets of grandparents had flown in over the weekend—when ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘did I mention? I flunked chemistry.’ Well, at first I didn’t catch on. I mean, I failed to understand that flunking chemistry would keep her from graduating. ‘Great, Katie,’ I told her. ‘What if you need to know chemistry later in life? If you’re, I don’t know, shopping for rose food or something?’ And she says, bold as you please . . .”
    Rebecca started silently calculating her losses. The planning, the decorations, the deposits made to the disk jockey and the bartender. Alice Farmer, the cleanup maid, would demand to be paid in full regardless, although the waiter (Biddy’s son Dixon) might be more forgiving. The Borders would have to forfeit their own deposit, of course, but that didn’t cover everything. And Biddy would throw a fit. Most of her dishes were perishable and not the kind you could freeze. To say nothing of all her work, and the thought she’d given the menu.
    “Well, isn’t it fortunate,” Rebecca told Mrs. Border, “that you’d already set up this party. It sends a message, don’t you think?”
    “’Mom,’ she said to me . . . Message?”
    “When your daughter must be feeling so disheartened, so discouraged with herself. But here’s this wonderful party to show her how much you love her.”
    “Oh, Mrs. Davitch, I can’t imagine—”
    “And a message to your friends, as well. A sort of statement.”
    “My friends! I don’t know how I’ll face them. They’re all going