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Show 90 Sunday she begins to prepare a last and final meal together. She kneads her hands into the bread she will bake in the evening, feels the potatoes rough and crisp between her hands as she peels them, watches cream swirl slowly into a pie. Every movement she makes is delicious; every dish is examined with affection; every tiny pinch of spice added with love, and even the crazy rancor she has felt towards her husband and sons in these last several weeks is ebbing now, now that she knows that the peaceful end at last will come: they will share this final meal, embrace one another, but then they will leave, and she will be free again to complete her life, in the stillness and tranquility she seeks. Yet she sees there is someone missing from these final family festivities: Luel's child. Annis moves towards the telephone. But Rod is already there. "I want her to be here for this last dinner," Annis says, "before you go." "We spoke to her at work," Rod says, as he recalls the dark-haired girl bending over the bar table. "She says she can't come." He sees the hurt this brings to Annis; he softens it a little, with another lie. "She says she's sorry, she'll come to see you as soon as she can." So Annis forgets the girl, and returns to her preparations for the final, farewell meal. She is wholly consumed in the simplest chores, allowing them to summon up a lifetime's memory of other meals cooked for this family, as small roguish toddlers, as sturdy schoolchildren, as painfully maturing adolescents, as full-grown adults. As she peels vegetables into the sink, she sees them now, just as they are, and all that went into making them. She sees the limitations of her little family: Rod's rigidness, for instance, from the time he was a small |
