Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (34 page)

“I know that,” Luke said.

On the telephone with Ruth, Ezra was jocular and brotherly, elaborately casual, playing down what had happened. “Now, Ruth, I’m sitting here looking straight at him and he’s perfectly al right… police? What for? Wel , cal them back, tel them he’s safe and sound. A lot of fuss over nothing, tel them.”

Luke listened, smiling anxiously as if his mother could see him. He laced the spirals of the telephone cord between his fingers. They were in Ezra’s little office behind the kitchen.

Ezra sat at a desk piled with cookbooks, bil s, magazines, a pot of chives, a copper pan with a cracked enamel lining, and a framed news photo of two men in aprons holding an entire long fish on a platter.

Then evidently, Cody took over the phone.

Ezra sounded more serious now. “We could maybe keep him a while,” he said. “We’d like to have him visit. I hope you’l let him.” In the directness and soberness of his tone, even in his short sentences, Luke read a kind of caution.

He worried that Cody was shouting on the other end of the line; he dropped the cord and wandered away, pretending to be interested in the books in Ezra’s bookcase. He felt embarrassed for his father. But there must not have been any shouting after al ; for Ezra said serenely, “Al right, Cody. Yes, I can understand that.”

When he’d hung up, he told Luke, “They’l be here as soon as possible. He’d rather come get you now, he said.” Luke felt a little notch of dread beginning in his stomach.

He wondered how angry his father was. He wondered how he could have thought of doing this—coming al this distance! So alone! It seemed like something he had floated through in a dream.

His grandmother’s house stil had its burned-toast smel , its dusky corners, its atmosphere of secrecy. If you moved in here, Luke thought, wouldn’t you go on finding unexpected cubbyholes and closets for weeks or even months afterward? (yes, imagine moving in. Imagine sharing the cozy living room, Grandma’s peaceful kitchen.) His grandmother skittered around him, adding tiny dishes of food to what was already on the table. Ezra kept tel ing her, “Mother, take it easy. Don’t fuss so.” But Luke enjoyed the fuss. He liked the way she would stop in the midst of preparing something to come running over and cup his face. “Look at you! Just look!” She was shorter than he was, now. And she had aged a great deal, or else he’d been too young before to notice.

There was something scratchy and flyaway about her little screwed-tight topknot, once blond but now colorless, and her face sectioned deeply by pockets of lines and her wrinkled, spotted hands.

He saw how much she loved him, purely from her hungry touch on his cheeks, and he wondered how his father could have misjudged her so.

“It’s not right that your parents just come and take you back,” she told him. “We’l make them stay.

We’l just make them. I’l change the sheets in Jenny’s old room. You can have the guest room.

Oh, Luke! I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was you if I’d seen you on the street; it’s been that long. Though I would have said… yes, I would have thought to myself as I passed, “My, that child reminds me of my Cody years ago; doesn’t he? Just fairer haired, is al .” I would have had this little pang and then forgotten, and then later maybe, making tea at home, I’d think, “Wait now, something was disturbing me back there…” his She tried to pour a bowl of leftover green beans into a saucepan but missed, and slopped most of the liquid onto the counter, and swabbed it with wads of paper towels while laughing at herself. “What an old lady! What a sil y old lady, you’re thinking. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. No, no, Ezra, I can manage, dear.”

“Mother, why don’t you let me take over?”

“I can certainly manage in my own kitchen, Ezra,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to go back to the restaurant? No tel ing what those people of yours are up to.”

“You just want to have Luke to yourself,” Ezra teased her.

“Oh, I admit it! I admit it!”

She turned on the flame beneath the saucepan.

“Everything is coming together,” she told Luke.

“I’ve been so worried, just sick with worry, picturing Cody in pain and longing to go to him, and of course he wouldn’t let me; he’s been like that ever since he was a baby, so…

thorny, so bristly, just always has his back up. And now a little trouble or something—no, don’t look so uneasy! I won’t ask any questions, I promise; Ezra told me; it’s none of our business, but… a little trouble of some kind brings you here to us, I don’t know, maybe an argument? One of Cody’s tempers?”

“Mother” said Ezra.

“And so,” she went on hastily, “we get to see him after al .

He’s real y going to show himself. But, Luke. Be truthful. He isn’t, he’s not… scarred or anything, is he? His face, I mean.

He hasn’t got any disfiguring scars.”

“Just bruises,” said Luke. “Nothing that’l last. In fact,” he added, “they’re mostly gone by now.”

It surprised him to find that he had held on to the picture of a broken Cody al this time, when real y the bruises had faded, come to think of it, and the swel ings had disappeared and the hair had almost completely grown over his head wound.

“He always was so handsome,” Pearl said. “It was part of his identity.”

Ezra moved around the table, setting out plates and silverware. The saucepan hissed on the stove.

Luke sat down on a kitchen chair and tipped back against a radiator. Its sharply sculptured ribs and tal pipes made him think of old-fashioned, comforting places—a church he’d visited with a kindergarten friend, for instance, or his second-grade classroom, where once, when a snowstorm started during lunch hour, he had imagined a blizzard developing and keeping al the children snugly marooned for days, drinking cups of soup sent up from the cafeteria.

After supper, he and Pearl watched TV while Ezra went back to check the restaurant. Pearl kept the living room completely dark, lit only by the flickering blue TV screen.

Both the front windows were open and they could hear the noises from the street—a game of prisoner’s base, a Good Humor bel , a woman cal ing her children. Around nine o’clock, when the twilight had final y given way to night and the stuffy air had cooled some, Luke caught the distinctive, tightly woven hum of a Mercedes drawing up to the curb. He tensed.

Pearl, who wouldn’t have recognized the sound, went on placidly watching TV. “Who’s that, dear?” she asked him, but it was some actor she referred to; she was peering at the television set. There were footsteps across the porch.

“Eh?” she said.

“Already?” She rose, fumbling first for the arms of her chair in two or three blind passes. She opened the front door and said, “Cody?”

Cody stood looming, larger than Luke had expected, his arm and leg casts glowing whitely in the dark. “Hel o, Mother,” he said.

“Why, Cody, let me look at you! And Ruth: hel o, dear.

Cody, are you al right? I can’t make out your face. Are you real y feeling better?”

“I’m fine,” Cody told her. He kissed her cheek and then limped in.

“Hey, Dad,” Luke said, rising awkwardly.

Cody said, “May I ask what you thought you were up to?”

“Wel , I don’t know…”

“Don’t know! Is that al you have to say? You scared the hel out of us! Your mother’s been beside herself.”

“Oh, honey, we were so worried!” Ruth cried.

She pul ed him close and kissed him. Her dress —a magenta polyester that she wore on special occasions—

crumpled its sharp ruffles against his chest. He smel ed her familiar, grassy smel that he’d never real y noticed before.

“We near about lost our minds,” Ruth told Pearl. “I believe I must’ve aged a quarter-century. I felt if I looked out that same front window one more time I’d go mad, go stark, raving mad—same old curve in the road, same old sidewalk, empty. You just don’t know.”

“I do know. I do know,” said Pearl.

She was feeling for the switch to a lamp that sat on a table. The silk shade rustled and tilted. Then Ezra arrived in the door. “Cody?” he said.

“Is that you?” He strode in fast and first encountered Ruth

—almost ran her down—and seized her hand and pumped it. “Good to see you, Ruth,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cody found the switch for his mother and turned the lamp on. It was coincidental; he was only being helpful, but Luke felt he’d turned on the lamp to examine them: Ruth and Ezra, face to face. Ezra blinked in the sudden light and then gave Cody a bear hug. Cody stood unresisting. “How’s your arm? How’s your leg?” Ezra asked. “What, no crutches?”

Cody went on studying Ruth and Ezra. “He says he can’t use them,” said Ruth. “He says with his opposite arm in a cast…” She reached out and smoothed Luke’s T-shirt, which didn’t need smoothing. She pushed his hair off his forehead. “And now that he’s got this walking cast…” she said absently. “Oh, Luke, sweetheart, didn’t you think you’d be missed?”

Cody turned away and sank into an armchair.

“Would you two like some iced tea?” Pearl asked.

“No, thanks,” said Cody.

“Or coffee? A nice cup of coffee?”

“No! God. Nothing,” said Cody.

Luke expected Pearl to look hurt, but she only gave Cody a curiously satisfied smile. “You always were a grump when you weren’t feeling wel ,” she told him.

In fact, how surprising this whole visit was!

—low-keyed and uneventful, even boring. Luke started out sitting rigidly erect, but gradual y he relaxed and let his attention drift to a variety show on TV. The grownups murmured around him without any emphasis, discussing money. Cody wanted Pearl to get a new furnace; he would pay for it, he said. Pearl said she had a little savings, but Cody kept insisting, as if there were something gratifying, something triumphant in buying a person a furnace. Oh, money, money, money. You’d think they could come up with some more interesting subject.

Luke pressed a lever in his armchair and found himself flung back, his feet raised suddenly on some sort of footrest. Now Pearl was asking where they would go after Petersburg, and Cody was saying he didn’t know; Sloan and he were hoping to take on this cosmetics firm down in… His reasonable tone of voice made Luke feel hoodwinked, betrayed. Why, al this time he’d been hearing such terrible tales! He’d been told of such il wil and bitterness! But Cody and Pearl conversed pleasantly, like any civilized adults. They discussed whether the North or the South was a better place to live. They had a mild, dul , uninvested sort of argument about it, til it emerged that Pearl was assuming Baltimore was North and Cody was assuming it was South. She asked if this new factory might be as dangerous as the last one.

“Any place is dangerous,” said Cody, “if idiots are running it.”

“Cody, I worry so,” she told him. “If you knew how frantic I’ve been! Hearing my oldest, my firstborn son is in critical condition and I’m not al owed to come see him.”

“Critical condition! I’m walking around, aren’t I?”

“The walking wounded,” she said, and she threw her hands up. “Isn’t it ironic? I’d always thought disasters were… lower class. I would read these hard-luck stories in the paper: lady evicted when she’s trying to raise the seven children of her daughter who was shot to death in a bar, and one of the children’s retarded and another has to be taken for dialysis so many times per week by city bus, transferring twice … wel , of course I feel sorry for such people but also, I don’t know, impatient, is if they’d brought it on themselves some way. There’s a limit, I want to tel them; only so much of life is luck.

But now look: my eyesight’s poorly and my oldest son’s had a serious accident and his son’s run away from home for reasons we’re not told, and I haven’t seen my daughter in weeks because she’s al tied up with her little girl who’s got that disease, what’s it cal ed, Anor Exia—his “How’s Becky doing, anyhow?” Cody asked, and Luke had an image of Cody’s reaching into a wild snarl of strings and tugging on the one short piece that wasn’t al tangled with the others.

“No one knows,” Pearl said, rocking.

Ruth massaged her forehead, which had the strained, roughened look it always got after a difficult day.

Ezra laughed at something on TV. Cody, who was watching the two of them, sighed sharply and turned back to his mother.

“We’d better be going,” he told her.

She straightened. “What?” she said. “You’re leaving?”

“We’ve got a long drive.”

“But that’s exactly why you’re staying!” she told him. “Rest tonight. Start fresh in the morning.”

“We can’t,” said Cody.

“Why can’t you?”

“We have to… ah, feed the dog.”

“I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“A Doberman.”

“But Dobermans are vicious!”

“That’s why we better hurry back and feed him,” Cody said. “Don’t want him eating up the neighbors.” He reached out a hand toward Luke, and Luke clambered off the reclining chair to help him to his feet. When Cody’s fingers closed on his, Luke imagined some extra tightness

—a secret handshake, a nudge at the joke they’d put over on Pearl. He kept his face deliberately expressionless.

“Listen, al ,” Ezra said. “It isn’t long til Thanksgiving, you know.”

Everybody stared at him.

“Wil you come back here for Thanksgiving? We could have a family dinner at the restaurant.”

“Oh, Ezra, no tel ing where we’l be by then,” said Cody.

“What,” said Pearl. “You never heard of airplanes?

Amtrak? Modern transportation?”

“We’l talk about it when the time gets closer,” Cody said, patting her shoulder. “Ruth, you got everything? So long, Ezra, let me know how it’s going.” There was a flurry of hugs and handshakes.

Later, Luke wasn’t sure he’d said thank you to Ezra—

though what did he want to thank him for, exactly?

Something or other… They made their way down the sidewalk and into Cody’s car, which stil had the stale, blank smel of air-conditioned air.

Everyone cal ed out parts of sentences, as if trying to give the impression that they had so much left to say to each other, there wasn’t room to fit it al in.

“Now, you be sure to—was “It sure was good to —was