French Braid by Anne Tyler

Author:Anne Tyler [Tyler, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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Mercy’s ice cream was chocolate. A half-gallon carton of house-brand chocolate ice cream. It seemed she’d deliberately chosen the most humdrum dessert she could think of. In fact, she came right out and said so. “I know how you all hate fancy food,” she told them while Alice was dishing it out.

Alice gave one of her nonlaughs. “Ma-ha-hahm! We don’t hate it; we just have fairly…standard tastes, in this family.”

“Exactly,” Mercy said, and then, to Greta, “I once took a course in French confectionery, back before I was married.”

“Really!” Greta said politely.

“It turned out to be all for nothing, though.”

“Oh, surely not.”

Meanwhile, the children were digging happily into their ice cream—except for Emily, who had barely touched her meal and sat listening now to the other children’s banter, gazing first into one face and then another with a faint hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. She made Lily’s Robby seem positively outgoing by comparison.

When Alice suggested they have their coffee in the living room, Lily rose and started clearing the dishes, but Alice said, “Oh, never mind those!” Greta, on the other hand, simply stood up and limped out without the slightest move toward clearing. This was noticed. Or Lily and Alice noticed, at least, and exchanged a brief glance, deadpan.

In the living room, Robin sank onto the couch and said, “Don’t know whether to sit down or lie down, after all that food,” but David and Greta remained standing. “We should probably hit the road,” David told Alice.

“What! Now?” she said. “You haven’t had coffee!”

“We’ve got a long drive ahead of us, and if we want to swing by Harborplace…”

The others had been seating themselves also—returning to the same spots they’d occupied earlier, as they tended to do—but now they stood up again, and there was a general air of uncertainty and some milling about. “Emily,” Greta said. “Time to go.” Emily, who had settled again beside the jigsaw puzzle, rose immediately and went to stand close to her mother. “Can you say thank you?” Greta asked her.

“Thank you for my lunch,” Emily told Alice in a ritual singsong.

“Oh, you’re welcome, honey,” Alice said.

“You have been very kind,” Greta said formally, and then she looked at David and he said, “Yes, great dinner, Alice! Good seeing you all,” and he gave them a wave and turned toward the foyer, with Kevin following to fetch their coats.

Granted, they were not a particularly touchy-feely family. But ordinarily David would have hugged his mother and sisters goodbye, at least, and clapped his brothers-in-law on the back.

It was Greta’s fault, Lily felt. She knew she was leaping to conclusions, but she couldn’t help feeling that David was under Greta’s influence, in some way.

Not that she said this aloud. When the door had shut behind the three of them, she just said, “Well!” at the same time that Kevin, returning from the foyer, said, “Well, now!” and rubbed his hands together briskly.

“Well, that was interesting,” Alice said.

But then

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