Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 24

  He looked over at Luke. Luke waited for him to go on.

  “See,” Cody said, “December twenty-seventh was Ezra’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 pillow over and settled back with a sigh.

  Luke went out in the yard and threw his baseball 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 ball 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 ball to him and said, “Not bad. Not bad at all,” 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 still 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—all those years of following 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 all 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 hell is the matter with this TV? Why bother buying a Sony if there’s no one who will fix it?”

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

  Ruth wore dresses all 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 hopefully 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, will 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 called 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 fellow workers to pay Cody visits, unless you counted that one edgy call 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—”

  “He can good and wait,” Luke said through his teeth.

  “Why, Luke!”

  “Let him pee in the bed.”

  “Luke Tull!”

  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 really …” 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 called 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, will 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 all 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 ball-point pen from Ruth. “Time is my favorite thing of all.”

  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 collect 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 penicillin, and his hay fever pills, 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, well, 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.”

  “Really?”

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

  “Well, 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 Tull! What a thought,” said Ruth.

  But it was too late. The words hung in the air. Luke felt miserable; he had all 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 telling 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 following 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, calling Luke “son.” Cody didn’t usually do that.

  They all 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 caller 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 call 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 telling Ruth. “This really happened. For my mother’s birthday I saved up all my money, fourteen dollars. And Ezra didn’t have a penny, see …”

  Luke scrabbled through his wooden footlocker, the one piece of furniture that really belonged to him. It had accompanied all 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 Bells” along with his classmates. He tried it now: White coral bells, 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 valley 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 naturally 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—”

  “Cody, Luke will 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? Tell me! I won’t get angry, I promise.”

  Luke went back to his room and closed the door.

  All 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 called 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 called 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 fallen 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 tells me …”

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

  “Whatever,” said the woman.

  Then beneath these voices, murmuring through the wall, came Cody’s grumble and Ruth’s pale answers. Luke covered his head with his pillow.

  He tried to recall 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 well 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 smelled 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 football-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 still doing here.” His room had been large—a sort of dormitory arrangement, occupying the whole third floor—but its stuffy smell of used sheets and twice-worn clothes had made it seem smaller. There was a lock inside the bathroom door downstairs, Luke recalled, that looked exactly like a little silver cashew; and the bathroom itself was tall 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 all; 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 taller.

  If Ezra were really 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 yellow … why! It was Luke’s kind of yellow, all streaky and layered. And his eyes were Luke’s kind of gray, a full 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 pillow off his head. Instantly, he heard Cody’s voice behind the wall. “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 hell of it.”

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

  Cody said nothing.

  The next morning, Cody seemed unusually 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 fell 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.