Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

the most beautiful hair, which still showed its chips of gold light, although she wore it short now. “I had such a crush on you,” she said. “Lord, I made a total fool of myself.”

“You played a game of checkers with Ezra,” he reminded her.

“Ezra?”

“My brother.”

“You had a brother?”

“I certainly did; do. You played checkers with him all afternoon.”

“How funny; I thought you only had a sister. What was her name? Jenny. She was so skinny, I envied her for years. Anything she wanted, she could eat and not have it show. What’s Jenny doing now?”

“Oh, she’s in medical school. And Ezra: he runs a restaurant.”

“In those days,” said Jane, “my fondest wish was to wake up one morning and find I’d turned into Jenny Tull. But I’d forgotten you had a brother.”

Cody opened his mouth to speak, but the man in white had moved away and it was Cody’s turn at the window. And by the time he’d bought his tickets, Jane had switched to the other line and was busy buying hers.

He didn’t see her again — though he looked for her on the train — but it was odd how she’d plunged him into the past. Swaying on the seat next to Ruth, holding her small, rough hand but finding very little to say to her, he was startled by fragments of buried memories. The scent of chalk in geometry class; the balmy, laden feeling of the last day of school every spring; the crack of a baseball bat on the playground. He found himself in a summer evening at a drive-in hamburger stand, with its blinding lights surrounded by darkness, its hot, salty, greasy smell of French fries, and all his friends horsing around at the curb. He could hear an old girlfriend from years ago, her droning, dissatisfied voice: “You ask me to the movies and I say yes and then you change your mind and ask me bowling instead and I say yes to that but you say wait, let’s make it another night, as if anything you can have is something it turns out you don’t want …” He heard his mother telling Jenny not to slouch, telling Cody not to swear, asking Ezra why he wouldn’t stand up to the neighborhood bully. “I’m trying to get through life as a liquid,” Ezra had said, and Cody (trying to get through life as a rock) had laughed; he could hear himself still. “Why aren’t cucumbers prickly any more?” he heard Ezra ask. And “Cody? Don’t you want to walk to school with me?” He saw Ezra aiming a red-feathered dart, his chapped, childish wrist awkwardly angled; he saw him running for the telephone—“I’ll get it! I’ll get it!”—hopeful and joyous, years and years younger. He remembered Carol, or was it Karen, reciting Ezra’s faults — a motherly man, she’d said; what had she said? — and it occurred to him that the reason he had dropped her was, she really hadn’t understood Ezra; she hadn’t appreciated what he was all about. Then Ruth squeezed his hand and said, “I intend to ride trains forever; it’s so much better than the bus. Isn’t it, Cody? Cody? Isn’t it?” The train rounded a curve with a high, thin, whistling sound that took him by surprise. He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he’d heard was music — a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on the wind and breaking his heart.

6 Beaches on the Moon

Twice or maybe three times a year, she goes out to the farm to make sure things are in order. She has her son Ezra drive her there, and she takes along a broom, a dustpan, rags, a grocery bag for trash and a bucket and a box of cleanser. Ezra asks why she can’t just keep these supplies in the farmhouse, but she knows they wouldn’t be safe. The trespassers would get them. Oh, the trespassers — the small boys and courting couples and the teen- aged gangs. It makes her mad to think of them. As the car turns off the main road, rattling up the rutted driveway, she already sees their litter — the beer cans tossed among the scrubby weeds, the scraps of toilet paper dangling from the bushes. This land has been let go and the vegetation is matted and wild, bristly, scratchy, no shade at all from the blazing sun. There are little spangles of bottle tops embedded in the dirt of the road. And the yard (which is not truly mown but sickled by Jared Peers, once or twice a summer) is flocked with white paper plates and Dixie cups, napkins, sandwich bags, red-striped straws, and those peculiarly long-lived, accordioned worms of paper that the straws were wrapped in.

Ezra parks the car beneath an oak tree. “It’s a shame. A disgrace and a shame,” Pearl says, stepping out. She wears a seersucker dress that will wash, and her oldest shoes. On her head is a broad-brimmed straw hat. It will keep the dust from her hair — from all but one faded, blondish frizz bordering each temple. “It’s a national crime,” she says, and she stands looking around her while Ezra unloads her cleaning supplies. The house has two stories. It is a ghostly, rubbed-out gray. The ridgepole sags and the front porch has buckled and many of the windowpanes are broken — more every time she comes.

She remembers when Cody first showed her this place. “Imagine what can be done with it, Mother. Picture the possibilities,” he said. He was planning to marry and raise a family here — provide her with lots of grandchildren. He even kept the livestock on, paying Jared Peers to tend it till Cody moved in.

That was years ago, though, and all that remains of those animals now is a couple of ragged hens gone wild, clucking in the mulberry tree out behind the barn.

She has a key to the warped rear door but it isn’t needed. The padlock’s missing and the rusted hasp hangs open. “Not again,” she says. She turns the knob and enters, warily. (One of these days, she’ll surprise someone and get her head blown off for her trouble.) The kitchen smells stale and cold, even in the heat of the day. There’s a fly buzzing over the table, a rust spot smearing the back of the sink, a single tatter of cloudy plastic curtain trailing next to the window. The linoleum’s worn patternless near the counters.

Ezra follows, burdened with household supplies. He sets them down and stands wiping his face on the sleeve of his work shirt. More than once he’s told her he fails to see the use of this: cleaning up only to clean again, the next time they come out. What’s the purpose, he wants to know. Why go to all this trouble, what does she have in mind? But he’s an obliging man, and when she insists, he says no more. He runs his fingers through his hair, which the sweat has turned a dark, streaked yellow. He tests the kitchen faucet. First it explodes and then it yields a coppery trickle of water.

There are half a dozen empty bottles lying on the floor — Wild Turkey, Old Crow, Southern Comfort. “Look! And look,” says Pearl. She nudges a Marlboro pack with her toe. She scrapes at a scorch on the table. She discreetly looks away while Ezra hooks an unmentionable rubber something with the broom handle and drops it into the trash bag.

“Cody,” she used to say, “you could hire a man to come and haul this furniture off to the dump. Surely you don’t want it for yourself. Cody, there’s a Sunday suit in the bedroom closet. There are shoes at the top of the cellar stairs — chunky, muddy old garden shoes. You ought to hire a man to come haul them for you.” But Cody paid no attention — he was hardly ever there. He was mostly in New York; and privately, Pearl had expected that that was where he would stay. Which of those girlfriends of his would agree to a life in the country? “You’d just better watch out who you marry,” she had told him. “None of your dates that I’ve met would do — those black-haired, flashy, beauty-queen types.”

But if only he’d married one of them! If only he’d been satisfied with that! Instead, one afternoon Ezra had come into the kitchen, had stood there looking sick. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. She knew it was something. “Ezra? Why aren’t you at work?”

“It’s Cody,” he said.

“Cody?”

She clutched at her chest, picturing him dead — her most difficult, most distant child, and now she would never have the answer to him.

But Ezra said, “He’s gone off to get married.”

“Oh, married,” she said, and she dropped her hand. “Well? Who to?”

“To Ruth,” he said.

“Your Ruth?”

“My Ruth.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said.

Not that she hadn’t had some inkling. She had seen it coming for weeks, she believed, though she hadn’t