Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

His spidery hands twisted in front of him. The crease in his forehead seemed deeper than ever.

“I’ve thought of you often,” Jenny said.

She didn’t mean it, at first. But then she understood, with a rush to her head that was something like illness, that she spoke the truth: she had been thinking of him all these years without knowing it. It seemed he had never once left her mind. Even Harley, she saw, was just a reverse kind of Josiah, a Josiah turned inside out: equally alien, black-and-white, incomprehensible to anyone but Jenny.

“Is your mother well?” she asked him.

“She died.”

“Died!”

“A long time ago. She went out shopping and she died. I live in my house all alone now.”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said.

But still he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Ezra turned from Oakes and asked, “Are you sure I can’t get you a snack, Jenny?”

“I have to leave,” she told him.

Going home, she wondered why the walk seemed so long. Her feet felt unusually heavy, and there was some old, rusty pain deep inside her chest.

The ash grove, how graceful, Ezra’s recorder piped out, how sweetly his singing … Waking slowly, still webbed in bits of dreams, Jenny found it strange that a pearwood recorder should put forth plums — perfectly round, pure, plummy notes arriving in a spill on her bed. She sat up and thought for a moment. Then she pushed her blankets back and reached for her clothes.

Ezra was playing “Le Godiveau de Poisson” when she left the house.

Down this street, and then that one, and then another that turned out to be a mistake. She had to retrace her path. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sidewalks were still wet, but the sun was rising in a pearly pink sky above the chimneys. She dug her hands in her coat pockets. She met an old man walking a poodle, but no one else, and even he passed soundlessly and vanished.

When she reached the street she wanted, nothing looked familiar and she had to take the alley. She could only find the house from the rear. She recognized that makeshift gray addition behind the kitchen, and the buckling steps that gave beneath her feet, and the wooden door with most of its paint worn off. She looked for a bell to ring but there wasn’t one; she had to knock. There was the scraping of furniture somewhere inside the house — chair legs pushing back. Josiah, when he came, was so tall that he darkened the window she peered through.

He opened the door. “Jenny?” he said.

“Hello, Josiah.”

He looked around him, as if supposing she had come to see someone else. She noticed his breakfast on the kitchen table: a slice of white bread spread with peanut butter. In the scuffed linoleum and the sink full of dirty dishes, in his tattered jeans and raveling brown sweater, she read neglect and hopelessness. She pulled her coat tighter around her.

“What are you, what are you here for?” he asked.

“I did everything wrong,” she told him.

“What are you talking about?”

“You must feel I’m just like the others! Just like the ones you want to escape from, off in the woods with your sleeping bag.”

“Oh, no, Jenny,” he said. “I would never believe you’re like that.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Nobody would; you’re too pretty.”

“But I mean—” she said.

She set a hand on his sleeve. He didn’t pull away. Then she stepped closer and slipped her arms around him. She could feel, even through her coat, how thin and bony his rib cage was, and how he warmed his skimpy sweater. She laid her ear against his chest, and he slowly, hesitantly raised his hands to her shoulders. “I should have gone on kissing you,” she said. “I should have told my mother, ‘Go away. Leave us alone.’ I should have stood up for you and not been such a coward.”

“No, no,” she heard him say. “I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it.”

She drew back and looked up at him.

“I don’t talk about it,” he said.

“Josiah,” she said, “won’t you at least tell me it’s all right now?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s all right, Jenny.”

After that, there was really nothing else to discuss. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye, and she thought he looked directly at her when he smiled and let her go.

“To everybody’s good health,” Cody said, raising his glass. “To Ezra’s food. To Scarlatti’s Restaurant.”

“To a happy family dinner,” Ezra said.

“Oh, well, that too, if you like.”

They all drank, even Pearl — or maybe the little sip she took was only make-believe. She was wearing her netted hat and a beige tailored suit so new that it failed to sit back when she did. Jenny was in an ordinary skirt and blouse, but still she felt dressed up. She felt wonderful, in fact — perfectly untroubled. She kept beaming at the others, pleased to have them around her.

But really, were they all here? In Jenny’s new mood, her family seemed too small. These three young people and this shrunken mother, she thought, were not enough to sustain the occasion. They could have used several more members — a family clown, for instance; and a genuine black sheep, blacker than Cody; and maybe one of those managerial older sisters who holds a group together by force. As things were, it was Ezra who had to hold them together. He wasn’t doing a very good job. He was too absorbed in the food. Right now he was conferring with the waiter, gesturing toward the soup, which had arrived a touch too cool, he said — though to Jenny it seemed fine. And now Pearl was collecting her purse and sliding back her chair. “Powder room,” she mouthed to Jenny. Ezra would be all the more upset, once he noticed she’d gone. He liked the family in a group, a cluster, and he hated Pearl’s habit of constantly “freshening up” in a restaurant, just as he hated for Cody to smoke his slim cigars between courses. “I wish just once,” he was always saying, “we could get through a meal from start to finish,” and he would say it again as soon as he discovered Pearl was missing. But now he was telling the waiter, “If Andrew would keep the china hot—”

“He mostly does, I swear it, but the warming oven’s broke.”

“What’s your opinion?” Cody whispered, setting his face close to Jenny’s. “Has Ezra ever slept with Mrs. Scarlatti? Or has he not.”

Jenny’s mouth dropped open.

“Well?” he asked.

“Cody Tull!”

“Don’t tell me it hasn’t occurred to you. A lonely rich widow, or whatever she is; nice-looking boy with no prospects …”

“That’s disgusting,” Jenny told him.

“Not at all,” Cody said blandly, sitting back. He had a way of surveying people from under half-lowered lids which made him look tolerant and worldly. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said, “with taking advantage of your luck. And you have to admit Ezra’s lucky; born lucky. Have you ever noticed what happens when I bring around my girlfriends? They fall all over him. They have ever since we were kids. What do they see in him, anyway? How does he do it? Is it luck? You’re a woman; what’s his secret?”

“Honestly, Cody,” Jenny said, “I wish you’d grow out of this.”

Ezra finished his conversation with the waiter. “Where’s Mother?” he asked. “I turn my back one second and she disappears.”

“Powder room,” said Cody, lighting a cigar.

“Oh, why does she always do that? More soup is coming, fresh off the stove, piping hot this time.”

“Are you having it brought in by barefoot runners?” Cody asked.

Jenny said, “Don’t worry, Ezra. I’ll go call her.”