Lunch At The Piccadilly

A recent arrival at the Rosehaven Convalescence Center to recuperate from a bad fall, the elderly but irrepressible Lil Olive turns the institution upside down when she and some of her new friends steal a car and hit the highway. By the author of Raney and Walking Across Egypt. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 28,000 first printing.

Older People in Cars

Carl Turnage takes slow, short steps so he won’t get ahead of his aunt Lil. They move along toward her maroon 1989 Oldsmobile sitting in the shade. It’s easy to spot because of the luggage rack on the trunk lid. They are headed to the Piccadilly for lunch, and after that he’ll let her practice-drive in the mall parking lot. Carl has mixed feelings about the driving part. Today will probably be the last time his aunt will ever drive a car—and it’s his job to break that news.

“Is that my car?” she asks. Humped over and thin, she holds to the arms of her walker. She wears gold slippers, tan slacks, Hawaiian shirt, striped jacket, and makeup that stops along her jaw like the border of a country.

“Yes ma’am. I washed it.”

“Well, it looks good.”

“I’ll let you drive it a little bit after we eat.”

He helps her into the passenger seat. Her head seems about as high as the button on the glove compartment. In her three months at Rosehaven Convalescence Center, she seems to have steadily shrunk—from osteoporosis—and has fallen twice but somehow not broken a bone. He folds her walker, and as he lays it in the backseat, her sunglasses drop out of her saddlebag and slide under the passenger seat. He retrieves them.

Back when Carl started driving, Aunt Lil owned a used 1968 Ford Mustang convertible, white with red interior. She let Carl drive it at least one Saturday night a month, as well as to his senior prom.

At the mall they park in their normal spot on top of the big two-deck parking lot.

In the cafeteria line, with tray rails to hold to, Aunt Lil doesn’t need her walker. Carl folds it and takes it on his arm.

This is a long lunch break for Carl. He’s a contractor at Richardson’s Superior Awning and Tile, and sometimes, on simple, straightforward jobs, he leaves his second- in-command, Juan, in charge of the other four or five workers.

Aunt Lil chooses chicken chow mein without rice. He gets it with rice.

Carl’s aunt Sarah, who died last year, once said that stopping driving was the worst thing she’d ever been through, including (1) her husband’s death, (2) her daughter’s divorce—it was a bad one—and (3) watching her dog Skippy get run over. Aunt Sarah was the last living of all his aunts and uncles besides Aunt Lil. She was the one who said that if she’d known she was going to live as long as she did, she’d have bought a new mattress.

Aunt Lil told that story when she bought her new mattress. That was about a month before she fell in her tub, twice on the same night. She managed, after the second fall, to get out of the tub and call Carl on the phone, and that night was the beginning of her downward drift, her gradual failing of mind and body, a decline less abrupt than his mother’s or Aunt Sarah’s.

On Aunt Lil’s tray is a plate of chow mein, a biscuit, a little dish of broccoli with cheese sauce, and iced tea. On Carl’s, chow mein over rice, fried okra, string beans, fries, cucumber salad, pecan pie, and a Diet Coke. At the cash register, Aunt Lil reaches for his little white ticket slip and puts it with hers. She’ll insist that he pay with her MasterCard.

A cafeteria worker carries Aunt Lil’s tray to one of her two favorite tables. Aunt Lil and Carl sit, Carl says the blessing, and they begin eating. He is never quite sure if he should say the blessing when he’s with her. Unlike his mother and Aunt Sarah, Aunt Lil has more or less given up on church. They don’t talk about it. Carl figures that’s one of the things they can talk about sometime, though now that they are the only two left—and now that he too has drifted away from the shore, as that old gospel song says.

He watches her look around for old friends. They talk about normal things. He checks his watch.

“Have you met Mr. Flowers?” she asks. “With that fancy white hair?” She pictures him, the new resident, rolling in his wheelchair out onto the porch—his leg stuck out straight ahead, a big smile on his reddish face. He’s a dandy.

“The one with the knee operation?” asks Carl.

“Yes. The preacher.”

“We talked a little bit the other day.”

“Where did you see him?”

“On the porch. You were with me.”

“On . . . ?” Why doesn’t he speak up?

“On the porch. When you were smoking a cigarette. You know, if you’d let me take you up to the hearing-aid place, I think we could get you fixed up.”

“I can hear okay. People’s talking has just fell off some.”

“I think it’s your hearing that’s fell off some.”

Sometimes, she thinks, he’s almost as bad as his mama used to be—pressing a point. “My hearing’s fine.” She takes a drink of tea. “Somebody said Mr. Flowers is a Baptist, and somebody else said a Pentecostal. He seems to have a little personality—I guess that means he’s a Pentecostal.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how Baptists are.”

“I know Baptists with personality.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What?”

Aunt Lil laughs. “I don’t know exactly.” She isn’t sure how to talk to Carl about religion. His mama was so devout. Sarah too.

“Mama had personality,” says Carl.

“You know what I mean. Sometimes they seem kind of dead. Baptists. I don’t mean your mama, for goodness’ sakes. And I’m sure there are some lively ones around. Well, I know there are.” Now that Carl’s mama has died, a kind of torch has been handed to her, Lil, though she’d never say that out loud. It’s all connected to her wanting a child and never having had one. Now that only she and Carl are left, maybe she can tell him about that lost boy from Tad’s former marriage, about how Tad tricked her, about how . . . but what good will it do to tell him all that? It’s old stuff, over the dam, spilt milk. It doesn’t matter.

Carl glances at his aunt’s hand to see how steady it is. Within the last year, she’s begun to shake noticeably. The Taylor sisters—his mother, Aunt Sarah, Aunt Lil—practically raised him, the only child among the three of them, and now that he is caring for the last living one, he carries a vague fear that he’s on the brink of a great silence. He can’t quite name his fear, a fear somehow related to the coming loss, probably not too far away, of Aunt Lil, the last person of the generation before him—both sides of his family, aunts and uncles. And he can’t decide how that fear is related, though he feels it is, to the fact that he’s only five feet six and speaks in a relatively high voice. Up into his twenties, he’d been expecting to—had been told that he would—grow taller and speak more deeply, and he had always imagined that when that happened, he would be fully grown up. But it didn’t happen. He stayed relatively short and high-voiced, and now here’s Aunt Lil, perhaps in her last year or two, maybe three. When she dies, his family—all the main ones—will be gone, will be no more. And he’s still not as tall and deep-voiced as he ought to be, had hoped to be.

But maybe—to make things easier when she does die —there’ll be a little money to cushion the blow. His few distant cousins have moved away, he is Aunt Lil’s favorite by far, and she...