CHAPTER FOUR SUNDAY DINNER
CHAPTER
FOUR
Sunday Dinner
Benny arrived twenty minutes early to Gloria’s on Sunday evening.
He should have made up an excuse not to come and stopped this before it went too far.
Three times he circled her block, counting down the clock and listing all the reasons he should go home.
Then, with an offering of flowers in one hand and a bottle of Green’s Corn Whiskey in the other, he rang the doorbell.
‘I’ll get it,’ he heard Gloria yell from inside, but when the door opened, a stony-faced man stood in front of him.
‘Good evening, sir. I’m Benny.’ He tried to sound casual but confident, friendly but not pushy or too eager.
‘Uh-hunh. I guessed that.’ He looked Benny up and down, frowning, and Benny’s pulse hitched.
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Gloria, running up behind her father. ‘He’s always a grump.’ She kissed Mr Meyers’s cheek and pulled Benny inside.
He relaxed a little with Gloria there and handed her father the bottle. ‘This is for you.’
‘Welcome, Benny,’ said Gloria’s mother coming out of the kitchen, an apron tied around her waist. ‘You’re right on time.’
‘Nice to see you again, Mrs Meyers.’ He gave her the flowers. ‘Thanks for having me to dinner.’
She winked at Gloria as she took the bouquet. ‘Well, aren’t you a sweetheart? Hon, put these in a vase for me.’ She handed them to her daughter and tugged at Benny’s hand. ‘Now, come in here and let us get to know you.’
He followed her into the living room, his stomach fluttering at the idea of Mr and Mrs Meyers getting to know him.
‘So, Benny, tell us all about yourself,’ Mrs Meyers said, when they’d settled themselves on the sofa and chairs.
‘Well, I work at a car factory.’ He rubbed the sweat from his palms along his thighs. ‘But I’m training to be an automotive engineer.’
‘Oh, good for you. That sounds nice, doesn’t it, Earl?’
Mr Meyers grunted.
‘And you own that house next to our son’s.’ She said it more as a statement seeking confirmation than as a question.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘A nice place to raise a family,’ Mrs Meyers declared. She patted Benny’s hand as she rose. ‘I’m going to check on dinner. Won’t be a minute.’
With just Gloria’s father as a conversation partner, the room fell quiet. He could hear Gloria and her mother in the kitchen but couldn’t make out what they were saying, though he figured Gloria’s bright laughter was a good sign.
He cleared his throat. ‘How long have you lived here, sir?’
Mr Meyers looked to the ceiling like the answer might be in the paint. Then he leaned back and hollered, ‘Shirley, how long have we lived here?’
‘Eighteen years,’ she called from the kitchen.
‘Eighteen years,’ he confirmed to Benny.
Benny nodded, and they fell into another silence until thankfully, mercifully, Gloria came into the living room and took a seat on the couch beside Benny.
‘You know, for someone who works with numbers, you can never remember the year of things,’ she teased her father.
‘Of course I can.’
‘Oh, really? How old am I?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Same difference.’
‘You see what I mean?’ she said to Benny. ‘He’s hopeless. I guarantee you he doesn’t know how old Ed is, or when he and Alice got married. Daddy, do you even remember what year you and Mother got married?’
‘Your mother reminds me.’
She rolled her eyes with such expert sarcasm she could have been Cora.
‘We don’t both have to remember,’ Mr Meyers said. ‘I bet Benny’s mother reminds his father too, like in every other marriage in America. Am I right?’
‘My father passed away when I was little, sir, so I don’t know if she did.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. What did he die of so young?’
‘Daddy! You can’t go asking stuff like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘It could be sensitive. Or sad.’
‘Pfft,’ he huffed.
‘How would you like it if people asked me how you died?’
‘I’m not dead, Glory.’
‘That’s not the point. It’s rude to be so nosy.’
Their back and forth gave Benny time to come up with a cause of death other than murdered-by-a-violent-white-mob-during-a-town-massacre. ‘Heart attack,’ he said. ‘It was very sad.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ Gloria glared at her father. ‘Very sad. Now no more third degree.’
‘All right, you three, come on through for dinner,’ Mrs Meyers announced from the doorway, taking off her apron.
‘That wasn’t even the first degree,’ Gloria’s father grumbled, heaving himself up from the chair.
They ate mashed potatoes, carrots and chicken, and Benny used so much salt and pepper on it, he worried he was being rude. What it needed was some hot sauce.
‘Delicious,’ he said to Mrs Meyers, who smiled back at him.
‘So, Benny,’ she said, ‘Ed tells me you have the greenest lawn on your block. Personally, I think he’s jealous, but don’t tell him I told you that.’ She smiled warmly. ‘So, what’s your secret?’
‘I use a fertilizer a friend once mentioned.’
Benny had driven to four different stores searching for the fertilizer Jasper talked about at Aunt Teen’s cook-out before everything changed.
He would have driven to fifty stores to find it.
Now every time he looked at his lawn he thought of Jasper and felt like he was still with him in some small way.
‘Well, your friend’s garden must be spectacular. Does he live in Levittown too?’
‘No, ma’am. He died in the war.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. That must be awful for you.’
‘We lost a lot of good people,’ Mr Meyers said. ‘But you boys did your country proud.’
Benny’s war memories began to stir, rising from where he kept them locked away, like shadows taking shape in the corners of his mind.
They’d left so many men on the battlefield, and it had taken him months to stop hearing the cries for help from soldiers he couldn’t get to, or worse, the silence after the screams. It’d been two years since he’d seen a buddy gunned down or blown apart, but the ghosts of the fallen still lurked around the edges of a spring day in Florida.
He shook his head to banish the shadows, burying them under his greener grass.
‘Mr Meyers, Gloria tells me you have an accounting business,’ Benny said, firmly changing the subject.
‘That’s right, son. Meyers Accountancy. If you know anybody who needs help with their books, you send them my way,’ he joked, but with enough earnestness to mean it.
‘I’ll remember that, sir.’ He pushed the food around on his plate and reached for the pepper. ‘Gloria said she helped out during the war when you were short-staffed.’
‘She certainly did.’ Mr Meyers speared a piece of chicken and pointed it at his daughter. ‘She was a godsend, weren’t you, sweetheart?’
‘I still am, Daddy.’
‘That you are, Pumpkin.’
‘I mean, I could still be working in the business. I have the same brain I had two years ago.’
He reached over and patted her hand. ‘I said it then and I’ll say it now. Glory, you should have been a boy.’
Benny could tell he meant it as a compliment, but Gloria shrank in her seat a little, her shine dimming. ‘I don’t know about that, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m mighty glad she’s not a boy.’
Her parents laughed and smiled, pleased, but more importantly, Gloria brightened and lifted her eyes to his.
Thank you, she mouthed, as her foot tapped him under the table.
Anytime, G, he mouthed back.