Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (32 page)

Luke looked politely at the hospital sign, and then swiveled his neck to go on looking after they had passed. It was the only response he could think of.

“Labor lasted thirty-two hours,” the driver said. “Safeway thought I’d hijacked their rig.”

“Wel ,” said Luke, “but the baby got born okay.”

“Sure,” the driver told him. “Five-pound girl. Lisa Michel e.” He thought a moment.

Then he said, “She died later on, though.” Luke cleared his throat.

“Crib death is what they cal it nowadays,” said the driver.

He swerved around a trailer. “Ever hear of it?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“Sudden crib death. Six months old. Light of my life.

Bright as a button, too—loved me to bits. I’d come home and she would just rev right up—wheel her arms and legs like a windmil soon as she set eyes on me. Then she went and died.”

“Wel , gosh,” said Luke.

“Now I got others,” the driver said. “Want to see them?

Turn down that sun visor over your head.” Luke turned down the visor. A color photo, held in place by a pink plastic clothespin, showed three plain girls in dresses so new and starchy that it must have been Easter Sunday.

“The youngest is near about your age,” the driver said.

“What are you: thirteen, fourteen?” He honked at a station wagon that had cut too close in front. “They’re nice girls,” he said, “but I don’t know. It’s not the same, somehow. Seems like I lost the… attachment. Lost the knack of getting attached. I mean, I like them: shoot, I love them, but I just don’t have the… seems to me I can’t get up the energy no more.”

A lady on the radio was advertising Chevrolets. The driver switched stations and Barbra Streisand came on, showing off as usual.

“But you ought to see my wife!” the driver said.

“Isn’t it amazing? She loves those kids like the very first one. She just started in al over. I don’t know what to make of her. I look at her and I can’t believe it. “Dotty,” I say, “real y it al comes down to nothing. It’s not for anything,” I say.

“Dotty, how come you can go on like this?”’

See, me, I never bounced back so good. I pass that hospital road and you know? I halfway believe if I made the turnoff, things would be just like before. Dotty’d be holding my hand, and Lisa Michel e would be waiting to be born.” Luke rubbed his palms on his jeans. The driver said,

“Wel , now. Listen to me! Just gabbing along; I guess you think I talk too much.” And for the rest of the trip he was quiet, only whistling through his teeth when the radio played a familiar song.

He said goodbye near Richmond, going out of his way to leave Luke at a ramp just past a rest center. “You wait right here and you’l get a ride in no time,” he said. “Here they’re traveling slow anyhow, and won’t mind stopping.” Then he raised his hand stiffly and drove off. From a distance, his truck looked as bright and chunky as a toy.

But it seemed he took some purpose with him, some atmosphere of speed and assurance. Al at once … what was Luke doing here? What could he be thinking of? He saw himself, alone in the fierce white glare of the sun, cocking his thumb at an amateurish angle on a road in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t even visualize how far he had to go. (he’d never done wel in geography.) Although it was hot—the peak of the afternoon, by now—

he wished for a windbreaker: protection. He wished for his bil fold, not so much for the smal amount of money it held as for the i. d. card that had come with it when he bought it.

If he were kil ed on this road, how would they know whom to notify? He wondered if—homeless, parentless—he would have to wear these braces on his teeth for the rest of his life. He pictured himself as an old man, stil hiding a mouthful of metal whenever he smiled.

Then an out-of-date, fin-tailed car stopped next to him and the door swung open. “Need a lift?” the driver asked. In the back, a little tow-headed boy bounced up and down, cal ing, “Come on! Come on! Get in and have a ride. Come on in and ride with us!”

Luke got in. He found the driver smiling at him—a suntanned man in blue jeans, with deep lines around his eyes. “My name’s Dan Smol ett,” he said. “That’s Sammy in the back seat.”

“I’m Luke.”

“We’re heading toward D. c. That do you any good?”

“It’s fine,” said Luke. “I guess,” he added, stil unsure of his geography. “I’m on my way to Baltimore.”

“Baltimore!” said Sammy, stil bouncing.

“Daddy, can we go to Baltimore?”

“We have to go to Washington, Sammy.”

“Don’t we know someone in Baltimore too?

Kitty? Susie? Betsy?”

“Now, Sammy, settle down, please.”

“We’re looking up Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy told Luke.

“Oh,” said Luke.

“We just came from Raleigh and saw Carla.”

“No, no, Carla was in Durham,” his father told him. “It was DeeDee you saw in Raleigh.”

“Carla was nice,” said Sammy. “She was the best of the bunch. You would’ve liked her, Luke.”

“I would?”

“It’s too bad she was married.”

“Sammy, Luke doesn’t want to hear about our private lives.”

“Oh, that’s al right,” said Luke. He wasn’t sure what he was hearing, anyhow.

They were back on the freeway by now, staying in the slow lane—perhaps because of the grinding noise that came whenever Dan accelerated. Luke had never been in a car as old as this one. Its interior was a dusty gray felt, the floors awash in paper cups and Frito bags. The glove compartment—doorless— spil ed out maps that were splitting at the seams, along with loose change, Lifesavers, and miniature tractors and dump trucks. In the rear, Sammy bounced among blankets and grayish pil ows. “Settle down,” his father kept saying, but it didn’t do any good. “He gets a little restless, along about afternoon,” Dan told Luke.

“How long have you been traveling?” Luke asked.

“Oh, three weeks or so.”

“Three weeks!”

“We left just after summer school. I’m a high school English teacher; I had to teach this grammar course first.”

“Lookit here,” Sammy said, and on his next bounce upward he thrust a wad of paper into Luke’s face. Evidently, someone had been chewing on it. It was four sheets, mangled together, bearing typed columns of names and addresses.

“Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy said.

Luke stared.

“They are not,” said his father. “Real y, Sammy.” He told Luke, “That’s my graduating class in high school.

Boys and girls. Last year they had a reunion; I didn’t go but they sent us this address list.”

“Now we’re looking up the girls,” Sammy said.

“Not al the girls, Sammy.”

“The girls that you went out with.”

“My wife is divorcing me,” Dan told Luke. He seemed to think this explained everything.

He faced forward again, and Luke said, “Oh.” Another rest center floated by, a distant forest of Texaco and Amoco signs. A moving van honked obligingly when Sammy gave the signal out the window.

Sammy squealed and bounced al the harder—a spiky mass of bones and striped T-shirt, flapping shorts, torn sneakers.

“What year are you in school?” Dan asked Luke.

“I’m going into ninth grade.”

“Read any Hemingway? Catcher in the Rye?

What are they giving you to read?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m new,” said Luke.

He could easily picture Dan as a teacher.

He would wear his jeans in the classroom. He’d be one of those casual, comradely types that Luke had never quite trusted. Better to have him in suit and tie; at least then you knew where you stood.

“In Washington,” Sammy said, “there’s two girls, Patty and Lena.”

“Don’t say girls, say women,” Dan told him.

“Patty Sears and Lena Sparrow.”

“I’m better on the S’s,” Dan said to Luke. “They were in my homeroom.”

“Lena we hear is separated,” Sammy said.

Luke said, “But what do you do when you visit?

What is there to do?”

“Oh, sit around,” Sammy said. “Stay a few days if they ask us. Play with their dogs and their cats and their kids. Most of them do have kids. And husbands.”

“Wel , then,” said Luke. “If they’ve got husbands…”

“But we don’t know that til we get there. Do we,” Sammy said.

“Sammy’s a little mixed up,” Dan said.

“It’s not as though we’re hunting replacements.

We’re just traveling. This divorce has come as a shock and I’m just, oh, traveling back. I’m visiting old friends.”

“But only girl friends,” Sammy pointed out.

“They’re girls I used to get along fine with.

Not sweethearts, necessarily. But they liked me; they thought I was fine. Or at least, they seemed to. I assumed they did. I don’t know.

Maybe they were just acting polite. Maybe I was a mess al along.”

Luke couldn’t think what to say.

“So listen!” Dan told him. “You read The Great Gatsby yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about Lord of the Flies? You get to Lord of the Flies?”

“I haven’t read anything,” said Luke.

“I’ve been moved around a lot; anyplace I go they’re doing Silas Marner.”

This seemed to throw Dan into some kind of depression.

His shoulders sagged and he said no more.

Sammy final y stopped bouncing and sat back with a Jack and Jil . Pages turned, rattling in the hot wind that blew through the car. On the seat between Dan and Luke, Dan’s address list fluttered.

It didn’t seem very long. Four or five sheets of paper, two columns to a sheet; it would be used up in no time. Luke said, “Um…”

Dan looked over at him.

“You must have gone to col ege,” Luke said.

“Yes.”

“Or even graduate school.”

“Just col ege.”

“Don’t you have some addresses from there?”

“Col ege isn’t the same,” said Dan. “I wouldn’t be going far enough back. Why,” he said, struck by a thought,

“col ege is where I met my wife!”

“Oh, I see,” Luke said.

Outside Washington, Dan stopped the car to let him off.

On the horizon was a haze of buildings that Dan said was Alexandria. “Alexandria, Virginia?” Luke asked. He didn’t understand what that had to do with Washington. But Dan, who seemed in a hurry, was already glancing in his side-view mirror. Sammy hung out the window cal ing, “Bye, Luke! When wil I see you again?

Wil you come and visit when we find a place?

Write me a letter, Luke!”

“Sure,” said Luke, waving. The car rol ed off.

By now it must be four o’clock, at least, but it didn’t seem to Luke that he felt any cooler.

His eyes ached from squinting in the sunlight. His hair had grown stringy and stiff. Something about this road, though

—the foreign smel s of tar and diesel fuel, or the roar of traffic—made him believe for the first time that he real y was getting somewhere. He was confident he’d be picked up sooner or later. He thumbed a while, walked a few yards, stopped to thumb again. He had turned to begin another walk when a car slammed on its brakes, veering to the shoulder in front of him. “For God’s sake,” a woman cal ed. “Get in this instant, you hear?” He opened the door and got in. It was a Dodge, not nearly as old as Dan’s car but almost as worn-looking, as if it had been used a great deal. The woman inside was plump and fortyish. Her eyes were swol en and tears had streaked her cheeks, but he trusted her anyhow; you’d think she was his mother, the way she scolded him. “Are you out of your mind?

Do you want to get kil ed? Do you know the kind of perverts in this world? Make sure your door’s shut.

Lock it, dammit; we’re not in downtown Sleepy Hol ow.

Fasten your seat belt. Hook up your shoulder harness.” He was happy to obey. He adjusted some complicated kind of buckle while the woman, sniffling, ground the gears and shot back into traffic.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Luke.”

“Wel , Luke, are you a total idiot?

Does your mother know you’re hitching rides? Where are your parents in al of this?”

“Oh, ah, Baltimore,” he said. “I don’t guess you would be going there.”

“God, no, what would I want with Baltimore?”

“Wel , where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

“You don’t know?”

He looked at her. The tears were streaming down her cheeks again. “Urn, maybe—was he said.

“Oh, relax. Never mind, I’l take you on to Baltimore.”

“You wil ?”

“It’s better than circling the Beltway forever.”

“Gol y, thanks,” he said.

“They’re letting infants out on their own these days.”

“I’m not an infant.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Sex crimes!

Muggings! Murders! Things that make no sense.”

“So what? I’ve been traveling on my own a long time.

Years,” he said. “Ever since I was born, almost.”

“For al you know,” she told him, “I could be holding you for ransom.”

This startled a laugh out of him. She glanced over and gave a sad smile. There was something reassuring about the comfortable mound of her stomach, the denim skirt riding up her stocky legs, the grayish-white tennis shoes.

Periodical y, she swabbed at the tip of her nose with her knuckles. He noticed that she wore a wedding ring, and had worn it for so long it looked embedded in her finger.

“Just two or three miles ahead, not a month ago,” she said, “a boy in a sports car stopped to pick up a girl and she smashed in his skul with a flashlight, rol ed him down an embankment, and drove away in his sports car.”

“That proves it’s you doing something dangerous, not me,” he pointed out. (how easy it was to fal into the bantering, argumentative tone reserved for mothers!)

“What did you pick me up for? I could be planning to kil you.”

“Oh, indeed,” she said, sniffling again. “You wouldn’t happen to have a Kleenex on you, by any chance?”

“No, sorry.”

“I’d never stop for just anyone,” she told him.

“Only if they’re in danger—I mean young girls alone, or infants like you.”

“I am not an—his “Yesterday it was a girl in short shorts, can you believe it? I told her; I said, “Honey, you’re inviting trouble, dressed like that.” Day before, it was a twelve-year-old boy. He said he’d been robbed of his bus fare and had to get home as best he could. Day before that—his “What, you drive here every day?”