Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (31 page)

“Wel , it’s only that… you can see that I’ve lost,” Luke said.

“It’s only a matter of time.”

“Sometimes it’s more like you’re Ezra’s child, not mine.”

“Cody Tul ! What a thought,” said Ruth.

But it was too late. The words hung in the air.

Luke felt miserable; he had al he could do to finish the game. (he knew his father had never thought much of Ezra.) And Cody, though he dropped the subject, remained dissatisfied in some way.

“Sit up straighter,” he kept tel ing Luke.

“Don’t hunch. Sit straight. God. You look like a rabbit.” As soon as he could, Luke said good night and went off to bed.

The fol owing morning, everything was fine again. Cody did some more work on his papers and had another talk with Sloan. Ruth cooked a chicken for a nice cold summer supper. Anytime Luke wandered by, Cody said something cheerful to him. “Why so long in the face?” he’d ask, or,

“Feeling bored, son?” It sounded funny, cal ing Luke “son.” Cody didn’t usual y do that.

They al had lunch in the bedroom—sandwiches and potato salad, like a picnic. The telephone, buried among the sheets, started ringing halfway through the meal, and Cody said not to answer it. It was bound to be his mother, he said. They kept perfectly silent, as if the cal er could somehow hear them. After the ringing stopped, though, Ruth said, “That poor, poor woman.”

“Poor!” Cody snorted.

“Aren’t we awful?”

“You wouldn’t cal her poor if you knew her better.” Luke went back to his room and sorted through his old model airplanes. His parents’ voices drifted after him.

“Listen,” Cody was tel ing Ruth. “This real y happened. For my mother’s birthday I saved up al my money, fourteen dol ars.

And Ezra didn’t have a penny, see…”

Luke scrabbled through his wooden footlocker, the one piece of furniture that real y belonged to him.

It had accompanied al their moves since before he could remember. He was hunting the missing wing of a jet. He didn’t find the wing but he did find a leather bag of marbles

—the kind he used to like, with spritzy bubbles like ginger ale inside them. And a slingshot made from a strip of inner tube. And a tonette—a dusty black plastic whistle on which, for Mother’s Day back in first grade, he’d played “White Coral Bel s” along with his classmates. He tried it now: White coral bel s, upon a slender stalk… It returned to him, note by note. He rose and went to his parents’ room to play it through to the end. Lilies of the val ey deck my— His father said, “I can’t stand it.”

Luke lowered the tonette.

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Cody asked.

“Are you determined to torment me?”

“Huh?”

“Cody, honey…” Ruth said.

“You’re haunting me, isn’t that it? I can’t get away from him! I spend half my life with meek-and-mild Ezra and his blasted wooden whistle; I make my escape at last, and now look: here we go again. It’s like a conspiracy! Like some kind of plot where someone decided, long before I was born, I would live out my days surrounded by people who were… nicer than I am, just natural y nicer without even having to try, people that other people preferred; and everywhere I go there’s something, just that goddamn forgiving smile or some demented folk song floating out a window—his “Cody, Luke wil be thinking you have lost your senses,” Ruth said.

“And you!” Cody told her. “Look at you!

Ah, Lord,” he said. “Some people fit together forever, don’t they? And you haven’t a hope in heaven of prying them apart. Married or not, you’ve always loved Ezra better than me.”

“Cody, what are you talking about?”

“Admit it,” Cody said. “Isn’t Ezra the real, true father of Luke?”

There was a silence.

“You didn’t say that. You couldn’t have,” Ruth told him.

“Admit it!”

“You know you don’t seriously believe such a thing.”

“Isn’t it the truth? Tel me! I won’t get angry, I promise.” Luke went back to his room and closed the door.

Al that afternoon he lay on his bed, rereading an old horse book from his childhood because he didn’t have anything else to do. The story struck him as foolish now, although once he’d loved it. When his mother cal ed him for supper, he walked very firmly into the kitchen. He was going to refuse, absolutely, to eat in the bedroom with Cody any more. But his mother had already set two places at the kitchen table. She sat across from him while he ate, not eating much herself. Luke shoveled in various cold foods and refused to meet her eyes. The fact was that she was stupid. He didn’t know when he’d seen such a weak and stupid woman.

After supper he went back to his room and listened to a radio show where people cal ed up a tired-sounding host and offered their opinions. They discussed drunken drivers and battered wives. It grew dark, but Luke didn’t turn on the light.

His mother tapped hesitantly on his door, paused, and left.

Then he must have fal en asleep. When he woke it was darker than ever, and his neck was stiff, and a woman on the radio was saying, “Now, I’m not denying I signed the papers but that was only his fast talk, only him talking me into it.

“Just put your John Doe right here,” he tel s me…”

“I assume you mean John Hancock,” the host said wearily.

“Whatever,” said the woman.

Then beneath these voices, murmuring through the wal , came Cody’s grumble and Ruth’s pale answers.

Luke covered his head with his pil ow.

He tried to recal his Uncle Ezra. It was several years since they’d met. And even that was such a brief visit, his father taking them away in a huff before they’d got wel settled. Finding Ezra was something like hunting through that footlocker; he had to burrow past a dozen other memories, and more came trailing up along with what he was after. He smel ed the burned toast in his grandma’s kitchen and remembered Ezra’s bedroom, which had once been Ezra’s and Cody’s together, where boyhood treasures (a footbal -shaped bookend, a peeling hockey stick) had sat in their places so long that to Ezra, they were invisible. Anything that caught Luke’s attention, Ezra had seemed surprised to see. “Oh! Would you like to have that?” he would ask, and when Luke politely declined, not wanting to seem greedy, Ezra said, “Please. I can’t think what it’s stil doing here.” His room had been large—a sort of dormitory arrangement, occupying the whole third floor—

but its stuffy smel of used sheets and twice-worn clothes had made it seem smal er. There was a lock inside the bathroom door downstairs, Luke recal ed, that looked exactly like a little silver cashew; and the bathroom itself was tal and echoing, ancient, cold floored, with a porcelain knob in the tub reading WASTE.

He tried to picture his cousins—Aunt Jenny’s children—

but only came up with another room: his cousin Becky’s ruffled bedroom, with its throng of shabby stuffed animals densely encircling her bed. How could she sleep? he had wondered. But she told him she had no trouble sleeping at al ; and whenever she went away to spend the night, she said, she took the whole menagerie in a giant canvas suitcase and set it out first thing around the new bed, even before unpacking her pajamas; and most of her friends did the same. It was Luke’s first inkling that girls were different.

He was mystified and charmed, and he treated her protectively for the rest of that short visit—though she was a year older than he and half a head tal er.

If Ezra were real y his father, Luke thought, then Luke could live in Baltimore where houses were dark and deep and secretive. Relatives would surround him—a loving grandma, funny Aunt Jenny, those rafts of cousins. Ezra would let him help out in his restaurant. He would talk about food and how people need to be fed with care; Luke could hear his ambling way of speaking. Yes, now he had it: the memory homed in. Ezra wore a flannel shirt of soft blue plaid, washed into oblivion. His hair was yel ow… why! It was Luke’s kind of yel ow, al streaky and layered.

And his eyes were Luke’s kind of gray, a ful shade lighter than Cody’s, and his skin had that same golden cast that caused it to blend into his hair almost without demarcation.

Luke let himself believe in some unimaginable moment between Ruth and Ezra, fourteen years ago.

He skipped across it quickly to the time when Ezra would arrive to claim him. “You’re old enough to be told now, son…”

Knitting this scene in the dark, doubling back to correct a false note or racing forward to a good part, Luke forgot himself and took the pil ow off his head. Instantly, he heard Cody’s voice behind the wal . “Everything I’ve ever wanted, Ezra got it. Anything in life I wanted. Even things I thought I had won, Ezra won in the end. And he didn’t even seem to be trying; that’s the hel of it.”

“You won the damn Monopoly games, didn’t you?” Luke shouted.

Cody said nothing.

The next morning, Cody seemed unusual y quiet. Ruth took him into the doctor’s to get his walking cast—a moment they’d been waiting for, but Cody didn’t act interested now. Luke had to go along to serve as a crutch.

He flinched when Cody first laid his heavy arm cast across his shoulders; he felt there was some danger hovering. But Cody was a dead weight, grunting as he walked, evidently thinking about other matters. He heaved himself into the car and stared bleakly ahead of him. In the doctor’s waiting room, while Luke and his mother read magazines, Cody just sat empty faced. And after he got his walking cast, he hobbled back to the car unassisted, ignoring Luke’s offer of help. He fel into bed as soon as they reached home and lay gazing at the ceiling. “Cody, honey? Remember the doctor said to give that leg some exercise,” Ruth told him.

He didn’t answer.

Luke went out to the yard and kicked at the grass a while as if he were hunting for something. Next door, a cluster of toddlers in their wading pool stared at him. He wanted to shout, “Turn away!

Stop looking at me; you have no business.” But instead it was he who turned, wandering out of the yard and down the street. More wading pools; more round-eyed, judging stares. A Welsh corgi, squat and dignified, bustled down the sidewalk, fol owed by a lady in a flowing caftan.

“Toulouse!

Toulouse!” she cal ed. The heat was throbbing; it almost breathed. Luke’s face became filmed with sweat and his T-shirt stuck to his back. He kept wiping his upper lip. He passed rows of colonial houses similar to his, each with some object featured like a museum piece in the living-room window: a bulbous lamp, a china horse, a vase of stiff-necked marigolds. (and what did his own window have? He couldn’t recal .

He wanted to say a weeping fig tree, but that was from an apartment they’d rented, three or four towns back.) Sprinklers spun lazily. It was a satisfaction to stop, from time to time, and watch a lawn soak up the spangled water drops.

Now here came some busy lady with her baby in a strol er, smal children al around her. He crossed the street to avoid them, took a right turn, and arrived on Wil ow Bough Avenue with its whizzing traffic, discount drugstores, real estate offices and bil boards and service stations. He waited at an intersection, pondering where to go next. One of the things about moving so often was, he never real y knew where he was. He believed his sense of direction had been blunted. He couldn’t understand how some people seemed to carry a kind of detailed, internal map of the town they lived in.

A Trailways bus zipped past him reading BALTIMORE.

Imagine hailing it. (could you hail a Trailways bus?) Imagine boarding it —assuming he had the money, which he didn’t

—and riding off to Baltimore, arriving at Ezra’s restaurant and strol ing in. “Here I am.”

“There you are,” Ezra would say. Oh, if only he’d brought his money! Another bus passed, but that was a local. Then a gigantic truck drew up, braking for an amber light. Luke, as if obeying orders, stuck out a thumb. The driver leaned across the seat and opened the door on the passenger side.

“Hop on in,” he told Luke.

No riders, a label on the window read. None of this was happening. Slowly, like someone being pushed from behind, Luke climbed into the cab. It was fil ed with loud music and a leathery, sweaty, masculine smel that made him feel instantly comfortable. He slammed the door and settled back. The driver— a knife-faced man, unshaven—

squinted up at the traffic light and asked, “Whereabouts you headed, son?”

Luke said, “Baltimore, Maryland.”

“Folks know you’re going?”

“Sure,” said Luke.

The driver shot him a glance.

“Why, my folks… live in Baltimore,”

Luke told him.

“Oh, then.”

The truck started up again. They rumbled past the shopping mal where Luke’s mother went for groceries.

A green sign swung overhead, listing points north. “Wel ,” said the driver, adjusting his mirror, “I tel you: I can carry you as far as Richmond. That’s where I have to veer west.”

“Okay,” said Luke.

Even Richmond, after al , was farther than he’d ever meant to go.

On the radio, Bil y Swan was singing “I Can Help.” The driver hummed along in a creaky voice that never quite hit the right note. His thin gray hair, Luke saw, had recently been combed; it lay close to his skul in damp paral el lines.

He held a cigarette between his fingers but he didn’t light it.

His fingernails were so thick and ridged, they might have been cut from yel ow corduroy.

“In the summer of fifty-six,” he said, “I was passing along this very road with my wife in a Safeway grocery truck when she commences to go into labor. Not but eight months gone and she proceeds directly into labor. Lord God! I recal to this day. She says, “Clement, I think it’s my time.” Wel , I was young then.

Inexperienced. I thought a baby came one-two-three. I thought we didn’t have a moment to spare. And also, you know what they say: a seven-month baby wil turn out good but an eight-month baby won’t make it. I can’t figure why that should be. So anyhow, I put on the brakes. I’m shaking al over. My brake foot is so shaky we’re just wobbling down the highway. You see that sign over there? Leading off to the right? See that hospital sign? Wel , that is where I taken her. Straight up that there road. I never come by here but what I recal it.”