Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

a teacher.”

“Who says so?” Josiah asked.

“Well, my mother does. He’s got the patience for it, she says. Maybe he’ll be a professor, even,” Jenny told him. But she wasn’t so certain now. “I mean, it’s not a lifework, restaurants.”

“Why isn’t it?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Ezra’s going to have him a place where people come just like to a family dinner,” Josiah said. “He’ll cook them one thing special each day and dish it out on their plates and everything will be solid and wholesome, really homelike.”

“Ezra told you that?”

“Really just like home.”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe people go to restaurants to get away from home.”

“It’s going to be famous,” Josiah said.

“You have the wrong idea entirely,” Jenny told him. “How did you come up with such a crazy notion?”

Then without warning, Josiah went back to being his old self — or her old picture of him. He dropped his head, like a marionette whose strings had snapped. “I got to go,” he told her.

“Josiah?”

“Don’t want those people yelling at me.”

He loped away without saying goodbye. Jenny watched after him as regretfully as if he were Ezra himself. He didn’t look back.

Cody wrote that he was being interviewed by several corporations. He wanted a job in business after he finished school. Ezra wrote that he could march twenty miles at a go now without much tiring. It began to seem less incongruous, even perfectly natural, that Ezra should be a soldier. After all, wasn’t he an enduring sort, uncomplaining, cheerful in performing his duties? Jenny had worried needlessly. Her mother too seemed to relax somewhat. “Really it’s for the best, when you think about it,” she said. “A stint in the service is often just the ticket; gives a boy time to get hold of himself. I bet when he comes back, he’ll want to go to college. I bet he’ll want to teach someplace.”

Jenny didn’t tell her about his restaurant.

Twice, after her first visit to Josiah, she looked in on him again. She would stop by the body shop after school, and Josiah would come outside a moment to swing his arms and gaze beyond her and speak of Ezra. “Got a letter from him myself, over at the house. Claimed he was marching a lot.”

“Twenty miles,” Jenny said.

“Some of it uphill.”

“He must be in pretty good shape by now.”

“He always did like to walk.”

The third time she came, it was almost dark. She’d stayed late for chorus. Josiah was just leaving work. He was getting into his jacket, which was made of a large, shaggy plaid in muted shades of navy and maroon. She thought of the jackets that little boys wore in the lower grades of school. “That Tom,” Josiah said, jabbing his fists in his pockets. “That Eddie.” He strode rapidly down the sidewalk. Jenny had trouble keeping up. “They don’t care how they talk to a fellow,” he said. “Don’t give a thought to what he might feel; feelings just like anyone else …”

She dropped back, deciding that he’d rather be alone, but partway down the block he stopped and turned and waited. “Aren’t I a human being?” he asked when she arrived at his side. “Don’t I feel bad if someone shouts at me? I wish I were out in the woods someplace, none of these people to bother me. Camping out in a dead, dead quiet with a little private tent from L. L. Bean and a L. L. Bean sleeping bag.” He turned and rushed on; Jenny had to run. “I’ve half a mind to give notice,” he said.

“Why don’t you, then?”

“My mama needs the money.”

“You could find something else.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t easy.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer. They raced past a discount jewelry store, a bakery, a bank of private apartments with inviting yellow windows. Then he said, “Come and have supper at our house.”

“What? Oh, I can’t.”

“Ezra used to come,” he said, “back before he worked in the restaurant and couldn’t get away. My mama was always glad to set an extra plate out, always, anytime. But your mother didn’t often let him; your mother doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, well …”

“I wish you’d just have supper with us.”

She paused. Then she said, “I’d be happy to.”

He didn’t seem surprised. (Jenny was astonished, herself.) He grunted and continued to tear along. His whisks of black hair stood out around his head. He led her down a side street, then through an alley that Jenny wasn’t familiar with.

From the front, his house must have been very much like hers — a brick row house set in a tiny yard. But they approached it from the rear, where a tacked-on, gray frame addition gave it a ramshackle look. The addition turned out to be an unheated pantry with a cracked linoleum floor. Josiah stopped there to work himself free of his jacket, and then he reached for Jenny’s coat and hung them both on hooks beside the door. “Mama?” he called. He showed Jenny into the kitchen. “Got company for supper, Mama.”

Mrs. Payson stood at the stove — a small, chubby woman dressed in earth tones. She reminded Jenny of some modest brown bird. Her face was round and smooth and shining. She looked up and smiled, and since Josiah failed to make the introduction Jenny said, “I’m Jenny Tull.”

“Oh, any kin to Ezra?”

“I’m his sister.”

“My, I’m just so fond of that boy,” Mrs. Payson said. She lifted the pot from the stove and set it on the table. “When he was called up I cried, did Josiah tell you? I sat right down and cried. Why, he has been like a son to me, always in and out of the house …” She laid three place settings while Josiah poured the milk. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “back when Josiah’s daddy died, Ezra came and sat with us, and fixed us meals, and made us cocoa. I said, ‘Ezra, I feel selfish, taking you from your family,’ but he said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Payson.’ ”

Jenny wondered when that could have been. Ezra had never mentioned Mr. Payson’s dying.

Supper was spaghetti and a salad, with chocolate cake for dessert. Jenny ate sparingly, planning to eat again when she got home so her mother wouldn’t guess; but Josiah had several helpings of everything. Mrs. Payson kept refilling his plate. “To look at him,” she said, “you’d never know he eats so much, would you? Skinny as a fence post. I reckon he’s still a growing boy.” She laughed, and Josiah grinned bashfully with his eyes cast down — a skeletal, stooped, hunkering man. Jenny had never thought about the fact that Josiah was somebody’s son, some woman’s greatest treasure. His stubby black lashes were lowered; his prickly head was bent over his plate. He was so certain of being loved, here if no place else. She looked away.

After supper she helped with the dishes, placing each clean plate and glass on open wooden shelves whose edges had grown soft from too many coats of paint. Her mother would be frantic by now, but Jenny lingered over the wiping of each fork. Then Josiah walked her home. “Come back and see us!” Mrs. Payson called from the doorway. “Make sure you’re buttoned up!” Jenny thought of … was it “Jack and the Beanstalk”? … or perhaps some other fairy tale, where the humble widow, honest and warmhearted, lives in a cottage with her son. Everything else — the cold dark of the streets, the picture of her own bustling mother — seemed brittle by comparison, lacking the smoothly rounded completeness of Josiah’s life.

They walked up Calvert Street without talking, puffing clouds of steam. They crossed to Jenny’s house and climbed the porch steps. “Well,” said Jenny, “thank you for inviting me, Josiah.”

Josiah made some awkward, jerky motion that she assumed was an effort toward speech. He stumbled closer, enveloped her in a circle of rough plaid, and kissed her on the lips. She had trouble, at first, understanding what was happening. Then she felt a terrible dismay, not so much for herself as for Josiah. Oh, it was sad, he had