Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Good-looking! Ezra?”

“I liked his kind of serious face,” Lorena said. “And those pale gray eyes.”

“My eyes are gray.”

“Well. Anyhow,” Lorena said.

“Besides,” said Cody, “he gets fits.”

“He does?”

“He’ll fool you. He’ll look as normal as anyone else and then all of a sudden, splat! He’s flat on the floor, foaming at the mouth.”

“I don’t believe you,” Lorena said.

“Some people think he’s dangerous. I’m the only one brave enough to go near him, when he gets that way.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Lorena said.

She twisted around to the head of Cody’s bed and lifted a corner of the window shade. “I see your mother coming,” she said.

“What? Where?”

She turned and flashed him a grin. One of her front teeth was chipped, which made her look unstable, lacking in self-control. “I was teasing,” she said.

“Oh.”

“You ought to’ve seen your face. Ha! I haven’t even met your mother. How would I know if she was coming?”

“You must have met her,” Cody said. “She’s a cashier now at Sweeney Brothers Grocery. Folks around this neighborhood call her the Sweeney Meanie.”

“Well, we do our shopping at Esmond’s.”

“So would I,” said Cody.

“How come she works? Where’s your father?”

“Missing in action,” he told her.

“Oops, sorry.”

He gave a casual wave of his hand and took a swallow of beer. “She runs the cash register,” he said. “Look in Sweeney’s window, next time you go past. You’ll know her right off. Walk in and say, ‘Ma’am, this soup can’s dented. Can I have a reduction?’ ‘Soup’s soup,’ she’ll say. ‘Full price, please.’ ”

“Oh, one of those,” Lorena said.

“Tight little bun on the back of her head. Mouth like it’s holding straight pins. Anybody dawdles, tries to pass the time of day, she’ll say, ‘Move along, please. Please move along.’ ”

He was smiling at Lorena as he spoke, but inside he felt a sudden pang. He pictured his mother at the register, with that anxious line like a strand of hair or a faint, fragile dressmaker’s seam running across her forehead.

Cody took every blanket and sheet from Ezra’s bed and removed the pillow and the mattress. Underneath were four wooden slats, laid across the frame. He lifted them out and stored them in the wardrobe. With great care, he set the mattress back on the frame. He drew a breath and waited. The mattress held. He replaced the bedclothes and he puffed the pillow and laid it delicately at the head. He lugged a pile of magazines from their hiding place in his bureau, opened them, and scattered them on the floor. Then he turned off the light and went to his own bed, across the room.

Ezra padded in barefoot, eating a sandwich. He wore pajama bottoms with a trailing drawstring. “Oh, me,” he said, and he sank into bed. There was a crash. The floor shook, and their mother shrieked and came pounding up the stairs. When she turned on the light, Cody raised his head and stared at her with a sleepy, befuddled expression. She had a hand pressed to her heart. She was taking in gulps of air. Jenny shivered behind her, hugging a worn stuffed rabbit. “Good Lord preserve us,” their mother said.

Ezra looked like someone in a bathtub full of cloth. He was having trouble disentangling himself from his sheets. One hand, upraised, still clutched the half-eaten sandwich. “Ezra, honey,” Pearl said, but then she said, “Why, Ezra.” She was looking at the magazines. They were opened to pictures of women in nightgowns, in bathing suits, in garter belts and black lace brassieres, in bath towels, in useless wisps of transparent drapery, or in nothing whatsoever. “Ezra Tull!” she said.

Ezra worked his way up to peer over the edge of his bed frame.

“Truly, Ezra, I never suspected that you would be such a person,” she told him. Then she turned and left the room, taking Jenny with her.

Ezra emerged from his bed, flew through the air, and landed on Cody. He grabbed a handful of hair and started shaking Cody’s head. All Cody could say was, “Mmf! Mmf!” because he didn’t want their mother to hear. Finally he managed to bite Ezra’s knee and Ezra rolled off, panting and sobbing. He must have knocked into something at some earlier point, because his left eye was swelling. It made him look sad. Cody got up and showed him where he’d stashed the slats. They fitted them into place, heaved the mattress back on the frame, and attempted to smooth the blankets. Then Cody turned out the light, and they climbed into their beds and went to sleep.

Sometimes Cody dreamed about his father. He would be stepping through the doorway, wearing one of his salesman suits, bringing the afternoon paper as he always did on Friday. His ordinariness was astounding — his thick strings of hair and the tired, yellowish puffs beneath his eyes. (In waking memories, lately, he was not so real, but had blurred and leveled and lost his details.) “How was your week?” he asked, tediously. Cody’s mother answered, “Oh, all right.”

In these dreams, Cody was not his present self. He had somehow slid backward and become a toddler again, rushing around on tiny, fat legs, feverishly showing off. “See this? And this? See me somersault? See me pull my wagon?” His smallness colored every act; he was conscious of a desperate need to learn to manage, to take charge of his surroundings. Waking in the dark, the first thing he did was stretch his long legs and lift his arms, which were becoming veiny and roped with muscle. He thought of how it would be if his father returned some time in the future, when Cody was a man. “Look at what I’ve accomplished,” Cody would tell him. “Notice where I’ve got to, how far I’ve come without you.”

Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Was it something I didn’t do, that made you go away?

* * *

School started, and Cody entered ninth grade. He and his two best friends landed in the same homeroom. Sometimes Pete and Boyd came home with him; they all walked the long way, avoiding the grocery store where Cody’s mother worked. Cody had to keep things separate — his friends in one half of his life and his family in the other half. His mother hated for Cody to mix with outsiders. “Why don’t you ever have someone over?” she would ask, but she didn’t deceive him for a moment. He’d say, “Nah, I don’t need anybody,” and she would look pleased. “I guess your family’s enough for you, isn’t it?” she would ask. “Aren’t we lucky to have each other?”

He only allowed his friends in the house when his mother was at work, and sometimes for no reason he could name he would lead them through her belongings. He would open her smallest top bureau drawer and show them the real gold brooch that his father had given her when they were courting. “He thinks a lot of her,” he would say. “He’s given her heaps of stuff. Heaps. There’s heaps of other stuff that I just don’t happen to have on hand.” His friends looked bored. Switching tactics, Cody would show them her ironed handkerchiefs stacked so exactly that they seemed encased by an invisible square box. “I mean,” he said, “your mothers don’t do that, do they? Do they? Women!” he said, and then, musing over some mysterious metal clasp or something that was evidently used to hold up stockings, “Who can understand them? Really: can you figure them out? She likes Ezra best, my dumb brother Ezra. Sissy old Ezra. I mean, if it were Jenny, I could see it — Jenny being a girl and all. But Ezra! Who could like Ezra? Can you give me a single reason why?”

His friends shrugged, idly gazing around the room and jingling the loose change in their pockets.

He hid Ezra’s left sneaker, his arithmetic homework, his baseball mitt, his fountain pen, and his favorite sweater. He shut Ezra’s cat in the linen cupboard. He took Ezra’s bamboo whistle to school and put it in the jacket of Josiah Payson, Ezra’s best friend — a wild-eyed boy, the size of a full-grown man, who was thought by some to