Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“All that green! And so many birds. Last summer, before my father-in-law fell ill, we were renting a house in New Jersey. The Garden State, they call it. There were roses everywhere. We could sit on the lawn after supper and listen to the nightingales.”

“The what?” said Ezra.

“The nightingales.”

“Nightingales? In New Jersey?”

“Of course,” she said. “Also we liked the shopping. In particular, Korvette’s. My husband likes the … how do you say? Drip and dry suits.”

The sick man moaned and tossed, nearly dislodging a tube that entered the back of his wrist. His wife, an ancient, papery lady, leaned toward him and stroked his hand. She murmured something, and then she turned to the younger woman. Ezra saw that she was crying. She didn’t attempt to hide it but wept openly, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah,” the younger woman said, and she left Ezra’s side and bent over the wife. She gathered her up in her arms as she’d gathered the child earlier. Ezra knew he should leave, but he didn’t. Instead he turned and gazed out the window, slightly tilting his head and looking nonchalant, as some men do when they have rung a doorbell and are standing on the porch, waiting to be noticed and invited in.

Ezra’s sister, Jenny, sat at the desk in her old bedroom, reading a battered textbook. She was strikingly pretty, even in reading glasses and the no-color quilted bathrobe she always left on a closet hook for her visits home. Ezra stopped at her doorway and peered in. “Jenny?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d take a breather,” she said. She removed her glasses and gave him a blurry, unfocused look.

“It isn’t semester break yet, is it?”

“Semester break! Do you think medical students have time for such things?”

“No, well,” he said.

But lately she’d been home more often than not, it appeared to him. And she never mentioned Harley, her husband. She hadn’t referred to him once all fall, and maybe even all summer. “It’s my opinion she’s left him,” Ezra’s mother had said recently. “Oh, don’t act so surprised! It must have crossed your mind. Here she suddenly moves to a new address — closer to the school, she claims — and then can’t have us to visit, anytime I offer; always too busy or preparing for some quiz, and when I call, you notice, it’s never Harley who answers, never once Harley who picks up the phone. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? But I’m unable to broach the subject. I mean, she deflects me, if you know what I mean. Somehow I just never … you could, though. She always did feel closer to you than to me or Cody. Won’t you just ask her what’s what?”

But now when he lounged in the doorway, trying to find some way to sidle into a conversation, Jenny put her glasses back on and returned to her book. He felt dismissed. “Um,” he said. “How are things in Paulham?”

“Fine,” she said, eyes scanning the print.

“Harley all right?”

There was a deep, studious silence.

“It doesn’t seem we ever get to see him any more,” Ezra said.

“He’s okay,” Jenny said.

She turned a page.

Ezra waited a while longer, and then he straightened up from the doorway and went downstairs. He found his mother in the kitchen, unpacking groceries. “Well?” she asked him.

“Well, what?”

“Did you talk to Jenny?”

“Ah …”

She still had her coat on; she thrust her hands in her pockets and faced him squarely, with her bun slipping down the back of her head. “You promised me,” she told him. “You swore you’d talk to her.”

“I didn’t swear to, Mother.”

“You took a solemn oath,” she told him.

“I notice she still wears a ring,” he said hopefully.

“So what,” said his mother. She went back to her groceries.

“She wouldn’t wear a ring if she and Harley were separated, would she?”

“She would if she wanted to fool us.”

“Well, I don’t know, if she wants to fool us maybe we ought to act fooled. I don’t know.”

“All my life,” his mother said, “people have been trying to shut me out. Even my children. Especially my children. If I so much as ask that girl how she’s been, she shies away like I’d inquired into the deepest, darkest part of her. Now, why should she be so standoffish?”

Ezra said, “Maybe she cares more about what you think than what outsiders think.”

“Ha,” said his mother. She lifted a carton of eggs from the grocery bag.

“I’m worried I don’t know how to get in touch with people,” Ezra said.

“Hmm?”

“I’m worried if I come too close, they’ll say I’m overstepping. They’ll say I’m pushy, or … emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think I don’t care. I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day. There’s this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.”

“Nonsense; I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said his mother, and then she held up an egg. “Will you look at this? Out of one dozen eggs, four are cracked. Two are smushed. I can’t imagine what Sweeney Brothers is coming to, these days.”

Ezra waited a while, but she didn’t say any more. Finally, he left.

He tore down the wall between the restaurant kitchen and the dining room, doing most of the work in a single night. He slung a sledgehammer in a steady rhythm, then ripped away at hunks of plaster till a thick white dust had settled over everything. Then he came upon a mass of pipes and electrical wires and he had to call in professionals to finish off the job. The damage was so extensive that he was forced to stay closed for four straight weekdays, losing a good deal of money.

He figured that while he was at it, he might as well redecorate the dining room. He raced around the windows and dragged down the stiff brocade draperies; he peeled up the carpeting and persuaded a brigade of workmen to sand and polish the floorboards.

By the evening of the fourth day, he was so tired that he could feel the hinging of every muscle. Even so, he washed the white from his hair and changed out of his speckled jeans and went to pay a visit to Mrs. Scarlatti. She lay in her usual position, slightly propped, but her expression was alert and she even managed a smile when he entered. “Guess what, angel,” she whispered. “Tomorrow they’re letting me leave.”

“Leave?”

“I asked the doctor, and he’s letting me go home.”

“Home?”

“As long as I hire a nurse, he says … Well, don’t just stand there, Ezra. I need for you to see about a nurse. If you’ll look in that nightstand …”

It was more talking than she’d done in weeks. Ezra felt almost buoyant with new hope; underneath, it seemed, he must have given up on her. But of course, he was also worried about the restaurant. What would she think when she saw it? What would she say to him? “Everything must go back again, just the way it was,” he could imagine. “Really, Ezra. Put up that wall this instant, and fetch my carpets and my curtains.” He suspected that he had very poor taste, much inferior to Mrs. Scarlatti’s. She would say, “Dear heart, how could you be so chintzy?”—a favorite word of hers. He wondered if he could keep her from finding out, if he could convince her to stay in her apartment till he had returned things to normal.

He thanked his stars that he hadn’t changed the sign that hung outside.

* * *

It was Ezra who settled the bill at the business office, the following morning. Then he spoke briefly with her