Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

my pocketbook. Came time to board the train and I just couldn’t make myself put my fingers in and get out the tickets, assuming they were still usable; and couldn’t bear to reach in for the money to buy more tickets, either. So I called your daddy on the telephone, begged a dime from a nun and said, ‘Cody, come and get me; this isn’t really what I want to be doing. Oh, Cody,’ I said, ‘we’ve got so interwoven; even if you didn’t love me at all, now we’re so entwined. It’s you I have to stay with.’ And he left off work and drove down to collect me, all steady and sure in his fine gray suit, nothing like the rest of the world. Don’t you remember that? You’ve forgotten all about it,” she said. “It’s just as well, I reckon. Luke, when you almost lose a person, everything comes so clear! You see how much he matters, how there’s no one the least bit like him; he’s irreplaceable. How he always puts us first; I mean, has never, in all his days, left you and me behind when he’s off on business, but carts us to every new town he’s called to because he won’t do like his father, he says: travel about forgetting his own relations. It’s not true that he brings us along because he doesn’t trust me. He really cares for our welfare. When I think now,” she said, “about your daddy kissing me that first time—‘Very nearly, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, very nearly your brother-in-law,’ and kissed me so quiet but definite, insisting, like he wouldn’t take no for an answer — why, I see now that’s when my life began! But at the time I had no notion, didn’t grasp the importance. I didn’t know back then that one person can have such effect on another.”

But if she was changed (if even Luke was changed — fading into someone transparent, he imagined), Cody was absolutely the same. After all, Cody hadn’t suffered the strain of that coma; he’d been absent from it. He hadn’t worried he would die, once he came to, because it wouldn’t occur to him that he was the type to die. He’d sailed through the whole experience with his usual combination of nonchalance and belligerence, and now he lay thrashing on his bed wondering when he could get up again. “What I mainly am is mad,” he told Luke. “This whole damn business has left me mad as hell. I felt that girder hit, you know that? I really felt it hit, and it hurt, and all the time I was flying through the air I wanted to hit it back, punch somebody; and now it seems I’m still waiting for the chance. When do I get to get even? And don’t talk to me about lawsuits, compensation. The only thing I want to do is hit that girder back.”

“Mom says would you like some soup,” said Luke, wiping his palms nervously down his thighs.

“No, I wouldn’t like soup. What’s she always trying to feed me for? Listen, Luke. If your grandma calls again today, I want you to tell her I’ve gone back to work.”

“To work?”

“I can’t stand to hear her fret on the phone any more.”

“But all along,” Luke said, “you’ve been telling her you were too sick for company. Yesterday you were too sick and today you’ve gone back to work? What’ll she think?”

“It’s nothing to me what she thinks,” said Cody. He never sounded very fond of Grandma Tull, who had called from Baltimore every day since the accident. Luke enjoyed her, the little he knew of her, but Cody said looks were deceiving. “She puts on a good front,” he told Luke. “You don’t know what she’s like. You don’t know what it was like growing up with her.”

Luke felt he did know (hadn’t he heard it all a million times?) but his father had got started now and wouldn’t be stopped. “Let me give you an example,” he said. “Listen, now. This really happened.” That was the way he always introduced his childhood. “This really happened,” he would say, as if it were unthinkable, beyond belief, but then what followed never seemed so terrible to Luke. “I swear it: your grandma had this friend named Emmaline that she hadn’t seen in years. Only friend she ever mentioned. And Emmaline lived in … I forget. Anyhow, someplace far away. So one Christmas I saved up the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to wherever this Emmaline lived. I slaved and borrowed and stole the money, and presented my mother with the ticket on Christmas morning. I was seventeen at the time, old enough to take care of the others, and I said, ‘You leave tomorrow, stay a week, and I’ll watch over things till you get back.’ And you know what she said? Listen; you won’t believe this. ‘But Cody, honey,’ she said. ‘Day after tomorrow is your brother’s birthday.’ ”

He looked over at Luke. Luke waited for him to go on.

“See,” Cody said, “December twenty-seventh was Ezra’s birthday.”

“So?” Luke asked.

“So she wouldn’t leave her precious boy on his birthday! Not even to visit her oldest, dearest, only friend, that her other boy had given her a ticket for.”

“I wouldn’t like for Mom to leave me on my birthday, either,” Luke said.

“No, no, you’re missing the point. She wouldn’t leave Ezra, her favorite. Me or my sister, she would surely leave.”

“How do you know that?” Luke asked him. “Did you ever try giving her a ticket on your birthday? I bet she’d have said the same thing.”

“My birthday is in February,” Cody said. “Nowhere near any occasion for gift giving. Oh, I don’t know why I bother talking to you. You’re an only child, that’s your trouble. You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m trying to get across.” And he turned his pillow over and settled back with a sigh.

Luke went out in the yard and threw his baseball against the garage. It thudded and bounced back, shimmering in the sunlight. In the old days, his mother had practiced throwing with him. She had taught him to bat and pitch overhand, too. She was good at sports. He saw glimpses in her, sometimes, of the scatty little tomboy she must once have been. But it had always seemed, when they played ball together, that this was only a preparation for the real game, with his father. It was like cramming for an exam. Then on weekends Cody came home and pitched the ball to him and said, “Not bad. Not bad at all,” when Luke hit it out of the yard. At these moments Luke was conscious of adding a certain swagger to his walk, a certain swing to his shoulders. He imagined he was growing to be more like his father. Sauntering into the house after practice, he’d pass Cody’s parked car and ask, “She still getting pretty good mileage?” He would stand in front of the open refrigerator and swig iced tea directly from the pitcher — something his mother detested. Oh, it was time to put his mother behind him now — all those years of following her through the house, enmeshed in her routine, dragging his toy broom after her big one or leaning both elbows on her dressing table to watch, entranced, as she dusted powder on her freckled nose. The dailiness of women’s lives! He knew all he cared to know about it. He was exhausted by the trivia of measuring out the soap flakes, waiting for the plumber. High time to move to his father’s side. But his father lay on his back in the bedroom, cursing steadily. “What the hell is the matter with this TV? Why bother buying a Sony if there’s no one who will fix it?”

“I’ll find us a repairman today,” Ruth’s new, soft voice floated out.

Ruth wore dresses all the time now because Cody said he was tired of her pantsuits. “Everlasting polyester pantsuits,” he said, and it was true she didn’t look as stylish as most other women, though Luke wasn’t so sure that the pantsuits were to blame. Even after she changed to dresses, something seemed to be wrong. They were too big, or too hard-surfaced, or too shiny; they looked less like clothes than … housing, Luke thought. “Is this better?” she asked his father, and she stood hopefully in the doorway, flat on her penny loafers because in Garrett County, she said, they had never learned her to walk in high heels. By then, Cody had recovered from his mood. He said, “Sure, honey. Sure. It’s fine.” He wasn’t always evil tempered. It was the strain of lying immobile. It was the constant discomfort. He did make an effort. But then, not two hours later: “Ruth, will you explain why I have to live in a place that looks like a candy dish? Is it necessary to rent a house where everything is white and gold and curlicued? You think of that as class?”

It was the nature of Cody’s job that he worked alone. As soon as he finished streamlining whatever factory had called him in, he moved on. His partner, a man named Sloan, lived in New York City and invented the devices that Cody determined a need for — sorting racks, folding aids, single hand tools combining the tasks of several. Consequently, there were no fellow workers to pay Cody visits, unless you counted that one edgy call by the owner of the factory where he’d had his accident. And they didn’t know any of the neighbors. They were on their own, just the three of them. They might have been castaways. No wonder Cody acted so irritable. The only time Luke and his mother got out was once a week, when they went for groceries. Backing her white Mercedes from the garage, Ruth sat erect and alert, not looking behind her, already anxious about Cody. “Maybe I should’ve made you stay. If he needs to go to the bathroom—”

“He can good and wait,” Luke said through his teeth.

“Why, Luke!”

“Let him pee in the bed.”

“Luke Tull!”

Luke stared out the window.