Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (30 page)

At the time, I was al set to marry Ezra, your daddy’s brother. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? Oh, I got around, in those days!

Then your daddy stepped in. He was brazen as you please. Didn’t care how it looked, didn’t have an ounce of shame, just moved right in and claimed me for his own.

Wel , first I thought he was teasing. He could have had anyone, any girl he liked, somebody beautiful even. Then I saw he meant it. I didn’t know which way to turn, for I did love your Uncle Ezra, though he was not so… I mean, Ezra was a much plainer person, more like me, you would say.

But your daddy’d walk into the room and it seemed like, I don’t know, the air just came alive, somehow. He put his hands on my shoulders one day and I told him please, I was engaged to marry Ezra, and he said he knew that. He stepped up close and I said real y, Ezra was a good, good man, and he said yes, he was; and we hugged each other like two people sharing some bereavement and I said,

“Why, you’re near about my brother-in-law!” and he said,

“Very nearly, yes,” and he kissed me on the lips.” Luke lowered his lashes. He wished she wouldn’t talk about such things.

“And if we’ve had our ups and downs,” she said, “wel , I just want you to know that it wasn’t his fault, Luke. Look at me! I’m nothing but a little backwoods Garrett County farm girl, hardly educated. And I’m not so easy to get along with, either. I’m not so easygoing. You mustn’t blame him. Why, once—oh, you were in nursery school, I bet you don’t remember this—I packed you up and left him. I told him he didn’t love me and never had, only married me to spite his brother, Ezra, that he’d always been so jealous of.

I accused him of terrible things, just terrible, and then while he was at work I carried you off to the railroad station and… this is funny now when I tel it, but it wasn’t then: while we were waiting on the bench a Marine threw up in my pocketbook. Came time to board the train and I just couldn’t make myself put my fingers in and get out the tickets, assuming they were stil usable; and couldn’t bear to reach in for the money to buy more tickets, either.

So I cal ed your daddy on the telephone, begged a dime from a nun and said, “Cody, come and get me; this isn’t real y what I want to be doing.

Oh, Cody,” I said, “we’ve got so interwoven; even if you didn’t love me at al , now we’re so entwined. It’s you I have to stay with.”

And he left off work and drove down to col ect me, al steady and sure in his fine gray suit, nothing like the rest of the world. Don’t you remember that?

You’ve forgotten al about it,” she said. “It’s just as wel , I reckon. Luke, when you almost lose a person, everything comes so clear! You see how much he matters, how there’s no one the least bit like him; he’s irreplaceable. How he always puts us first; I mean, has never, in al his days, left you and me behind when he’s off on business, but carts us to every new town he’s cal ed to because he won’t do like his father, he says: travel about forgetting his own relations.

It’s not true that he brings us along because he doesn’t trust me. He real y cares for our welfare. When I think now,” she said, “about your daddy kissing me that first time—”Very nearly, yes,” he said. “Yes, very nearly your brother-in-law,” and kissed me so quiet but definite, insisting, like he wouldn’t take no for an answer—why, I see now that’s when my life began! But at the time I had no notion, didn’t grasp the importance. I didn’t know back then that one person can have such effect on another.”

But if she was changed (if even Luke was changed —

fading into someone transparent, he imagined), Cody was absolutely the same. After al , Cody hadn’t suffered the strain of that coma; he’d been absent from it. He hadn’t worried he would die, once he came to, because it wouldn’t occur to him that he was the type to die. He’d sailed through the whole experience with his usual combination of nonchalance and bel igerence, and now he lay thrashing on his bed wondering when he could get up again. “What I mainly am is mad,” he told Luke. “This whole damn business has left me mad as hel . I felt that girder hit, you know that? I real y felt it hit, and it hurt, and al the time I was flying through the air I wanted to hit it back, punch somebody; and now it seems I’m stil waiting for the chance. When do I get to get even? And don’t talk to me about lawsuits, compensation. The only thing I want to do is hit that girder back.”

“Mom says would you like some soup,” said Luke, wiping his palms nervously down his thighs.

“No, I wouldn’t like soup. What’s she always trying to feed me for? Listen, Luke. If your grandma cal s again today, I want you to tel her I’ve gone back to work.”

“To work?”

“I can’t stand to hear her fret on the phone any more.”

“But al along,” Luke said, “you’ve been tel ing her you were too sick for company. Yesterday you were too sick and today you’ve gone back to work?

What’l she think?”

“It’s nothing to me what she thinks,” said Cody.

He never sounded very fond of Grandma Tul , who had cal ed from Baltimore every day since the accident. Luke enjoyed her, the little he knew of her, but Cody said looks were deceiving. “She puts on a good front,” he told Luke.

“You don’t know what she’s like. You don’t know what it was like growing up with her.”

Luke felt he did know (hadn’t he heard it al a mil ion times?) but his father had got started now and wouldn’t be stopped. “Let me give you an example,” he said. “Listen, now. This real y happened.” That was the way he always introduced his childhood. “This real y happened,” he would say, as if it were unthinkable, beyond belief, but then what fol owed never seemed so terrible to Luke. “I swear it: your grandma had this friend named Emmaline that she hadn’t seen in years. Only friend she ever mentioned. And Emmaline lived in… I forget.

Anyhow, someplace far away. So one Christmas I saved up the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to wherever this Emmaline lived. I slaved and borrowed and stole the money, and presented my mother with the ticket on Christmas morning. I was seventeen at the time, old enough to take care of the others, and I said, “You leave tomorrow, stay a week, and I’l watch over things til you get back.” And you know what she said? Listen; you won’t believe this. “But Cody, honey,” she said. “Day after tomorrow is your brother’s birthday.” his He looked over at Luke. Luke waited for him to go on.

“See,” Cody said, “December twenty-seventh was Ezxa’s birthday.”

“So?” Luke asked.

“So she wouldn’t leave her precious boy on his birthday!

Not even to visit her oldest, dearest, only friend, that her other boy had given her a ticket for.”

“I wouldn’t like for Mom to leave me on my birthday, either,” Luke said.

“No, no, you’re missing the point. She wouldn’t leave Ezra, her favorite. Me or my sister, she would surely leave.”

“How do you know that?” Luke asked him. “Did you ever try giving her a ticket on your birthday? I bet she’d have said the same thing.”

“My birthday is in February,” Cody said.

“Nowhere near any occasion for gift giving. Oh, I don’t know why I bother talking to you. You’re an only child, that’s your trouble. You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m trying to get across.” And he turned his pil ow over and settled back with a sigh.

Luke went out in the yard and threw his basebal against the garage. It thudded and bounced back, shimmering in the sunlight. In the old days, his mother had practiced throwing with him. She had taught him to bat and pitch overhand, too. She was good at sports. He saw glimpses in her, sometimes, of the scatty little tomboy she must once have been. But it had always seemed, when they played bal together, that this was only a preparation for the real game, with his father. It was like cramming for an exam.

Then on weekends Cody came home and pitched the bal to him and said, “Not bad. Not bad at al ,” when Luke hit it out of the yard. At these moments Luke was conscious of adding a certain swagger to his walk, a certain swing to his shoulders. He imagined he was growing to be more like his father. Sauntering into the house after practice, he’d pass Cody’s parked car and ask, “She stil getting pretty good mileage?”

He would stand in front of the open refrigerator and swig iced tea directly from the pitcher—something his mother detested. Oh, it was time to put his mother behind him now

—al those years of fol owing her through the house, enmeshed in her routine, dragging his toy broom after her big one or leaning both elbows on her dressing table to watch, entranced, as she dusted powder on her freckled nose. The dailiness of women’s lives!

He knew al he cared to know about it. He was exhausted by the trivia of measuring out the soap flakes, waiting for the plumber. High time to move to his father’s side. But his father lay on his back in the bedroom, cursing steadily.

“What the hel is the matter with this TV? Why bother buying a Sony if there’s no one who wil fix it?”

“I’l find us a repairman today,” Ruth’s new, soft voice floated out.

Ruth wore dresses al the time now because Cody said he was tired of her pantsuits. “Everlasting polyester pantsuits,” he said, and it was true she didn’t look as stylish as most other women, though Luke wasn’t so sure that the pantsuits were to blame. Even after she changed to dresses, something seemed to be wrong. They were too big, or too hard-surfaced, or too shiny; they looked less like clothes than… housing, Luke thought. “Is this better?” she asked his father, and she stood hopeful y in the doorway, flat on her penny loafers because in Garrett County, she said, they had never learned her to walk in high heels. By then, Cody had recovered from his mood. He said, “Sure, honey.

Sure. It’s fine.” He wasn’t always evil tempered. It was the strain of lying immobile. It was the constant discomfort. He did make an effort. But then, not two hours later: “Ruth, wil you explain why I have to live in a place that looks like a candy dish? Is it necessary to rent a house where everything is white and gold and curlicued? You think of that as class?”

It was the nature of Cody’s job that he worked alone. As soon as he finished streamlining whatever factory had cal ed him in, he moved on. His partner, a man named Sloan, lived in New York City and invented the devices that Cody determined a need for—sorting racks, folding aids, single hand tools combining the tasks of several.

Consequently, there were no fel ow workers to pay Cody visits, unless you counted that one edgy cal by the owner of the factory where he’d had his accident. And they didn’t know any of the neighbors.

They were on their own, just the three of them. They might have been castaways. No wonder Cody acted so irritable.

The only time Luke and his mother got out was once a week, when they went for groceries.

Backing her white Mercedes from the garage, Ruth sat erect and alert, not looking behind her, already anxious about Cody. “Maybe I should’ve made you stay. If he needs to go to the bathroom—his “He can good and wait” Luke said through his teeth.

“Why, Luke!”

“Let him pee in the bed.”

“LukeTul !”

Luke stared out the window.

“It’s been hard on you,” his mother said. “We’ve got to find you some friends.”

“I don’t need friends.”

“Everybody needs friends. We don’t have a one, in this town. I feel like I’m drying up. Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “if this life is real y …” But she didn’t say any more.

When they returned, Cody was pleasant and cheerful, as if he’d made some resolutions in their absence. Or maybe he’d been refreshed by the solitude. “Talked to Sloan,” he told Ruth. “He cal ed from New York. I said to him, soon as I get this cast off I’m going to finish up at the factory and clear on out. I can’t take much more of this place.”

“Oh, good, Cody, honey.”

“Bring me my briefcase, wil you? I want to jot down some ideas. There’s lots I could be doing in bed.”

“I picked out some of those pears you like.”

“No, no, just my briefcase, and that pen on the desk in my study. I’m going to see if my fingers are up to writing yet.” He told Luke, “Work is what I need.

I’ve been starved for work. It’s made me a little snappish.” Luke scratched his rib cage. He said, “That’s al right.”

“You make sure you get a job you enjoy, once you’re grown. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing.

That’s important.”

“I know.”

“Me, I deal with time,” said Cody. He accepted a bal -

point pen from Ruth. “Time is my favorite thing of al .” Luke loved it when his father talked about time.

“Time is my obsession: not to waste it, not to lose it. It’s like… I don’t know, an object, to me; something you can almost take hold of. If I could just col ect enough of it in one clump, I always think.

If I could pass it back and forth and sideways, you know?

If only Einstein were right and time were a kind of river you could choose to step into at any place along the shore.” He clicked his pen point in and out, frowning into space.

“If they had a time machine, I’d go on it,” he said. “It wouldn’t much matter to me where.

Past or future: just out of my time. Just someplace else.” Luke felt a pang. “But then you wouldn’t know me” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Sure he would,” Ruth said briskly. She was opening the latches of Cody’s briefcase.

“He’d take you with him. Only mind,” she told Cody, “if Luke goes too you’ve got to bring penicil in, and his hay fever pil s, and his fluoride toothpaste, you hear?” Cody laughed, but he didn’t say one way or another about taking Luke along.

That was the evening that Cody first got his strange notion. It came about so suddenly: they were playing Monopoly on Cody’s bed, the three of them, and Cody was winning as usual and offering Luke a loan to keep going.

“Oh, wel , no, I guess I’ve lost,” said Luke.

There was the briefest pause—a skipped beat.

Cody looked over at Ruth, who was counting her deed cards. “He sounds just like Ezra,” he told her.

She frowned at Baltic Avenue.

“Didn’t you hear what he said? He said it just like Ezra.”

“Real y?”

“Ezra would do that,” Cody told Luke. “Your Uncle Ezra. It was no fun beating him at al . He’d never take a loan and he wouldn’t mortgage the least little thing, not even a railroad or the waterworks. He’d just cave right in and give up.”