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.He shook hands with Ben and gave him a wink, which I saw.He shook hands with Felix, too, and then everybody rushed around for a while, taking coats and fixing drinks and putting out bowls of nuts, while Mom and Ben looked like bad actors in an amateur play trying to look normal.The whole house smelled like turkey cooking, and Wuffie’s spaniels were hanging around in the kitchen looking hopeful.Those dogs are so dumb they’ll eat buttered cardboard, which Ben and Grandpa Joe proved last Thanksgiving.Mom and Wuffie went back to the kitchen and I overheard Mom saying, “Mother, this is my decision!” and Wuffie saying, “But darling, you are always so hasty.Ben is a prize.”“I’m not trying to knock ducks over at the fair.”Wuffie made a “Hmmph!” noise.Mom said, “Define prize.”“He loves you.He respects you.”“He doesn’t.” Mom rattled around in a drawer.“Where the hell is the whisk? And since he doesn’t, why hang around waiting for the inevitable?”“You’re leaving him before he leaves you?” Wuffie sounded really annoyed.“Sylvia—”“He thinks my feelings don’t matter.So I can see what’s coming.So, fine.”“I doubt that,” Wuffie said, and I did too.I know why she’s mad but I can’t see why she thinks it means he doesn’t love her.Then Grandma Alice came in to help and they had to quit arguing.Ben was talking to Grandpa Joe, and I realized they were expecting me to talk to Felix since I’d invited him.He was looking at a big silver bowl full of pomegranates on the buffet.“You ever eat one of these?” he asked me, poking them with a finger.“Yeah.They take forever.You have to peel them and pick the seeds out.It’s the seeds you eat.”“I know,” he said.“We used to have a tree in the backyard when I was a kid.The seeds look like little rubies and the juice stains your fingers.”“Grandpa Joe fed me some seeds and told me the Persephone story when I was about four.Scared me to death,” I said.“I thought I was going to have to go live in the Underworld.”“She ate six seeds, right? And so she had to stay six months in the Underworld after Hades kidnapped her.That idea’s even older than the Greeks,” Felix told me.“In a lot of cultures, if you eat somewhere you tie yourself to it.And it to you.”Was that what he did in Vietnam? Eat there and tie himself to it? Well, of course you’d have to eat.But eating was a metaphor.Mom’s big on metaphor, so I know all about that.Sex, death, and food are all linked up together.I could feel my face burning again as soon as I had that thought.My coloring makes it hard to see me blush (one of life’s little compensations), but Felix could tell from my expression that something was wrong.“Uh, you have any more weird dreams?” he asked.I snapped my head around.“Why do you ask?”“Which one was it?” he said.I kept my eyes on the pomegranates.“Um.In a bar.Um.”He laughed suddenly.I don’t think I’d ever heard him laugh before that.He sat down on the sofa and closed his eyes, grinning a huge grin.“I guess it was educational,” he said, with his eyes closed.“Will you shut up?” I hissed.I sat down next to him so I could whisper.“I did not want to know that stuff.”“Well, I didn’t exactly want you to know it,” he whispered back.At least he was being quiet.“What kind of behavior is that for a saint, anyway?”“Saints are human.”“All the girl saints were martyred for refusing to marry pagans.They didn’t do stuff like that.”“I’m not a girl saint.”“You’re not any kind of saint.I don’t know why I even said that.Get your dreams out of my head!”“Angie!” Wuffie called from the kitchen.“Would you and, uh, Felix, set the table for me? Use the good china.”Felix hopped up from the sofa.“Great! Let’s go be useful.”I’ve spent my whole life hanging around Wuffie’s house, so I know where everything is.I showed Felix the good dishes in the cabinet and I got out the silver.Wuffie already had the good tablecloth on, so we laid out seven places—Wuffie and Grandpa Joe at each end, and the rest of us two to one side, three to the other.If I could manage it I was going to get Grandma Alice and Felix on one side with me, so Mom would have to sit next to Ben.Grandpa Joe carried the turkey in and everybody else brought the other stuff [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]