Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“It’s been hard on you,” his mother said. “We’ve got to find you some friends.”

“I don’t need friends.”

“Everybody needs friends. We don’t have a one, in this town. I feel like I’m drying up. Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “if this life is really …” But she didn’t say any more.

When they returned, Cody was pleasant and cheerful, as if he’d made some resolutions in their absence. Or maybe he’d been refreshed by the solitude. “Talked to Sloan,” he told Ruth. “He called from New York. I said to him, soon as I get this cast off I’m going to finish up at the factory and clear on out. I can’t take much more of this place.”

“Oh, good, Cody, honey.”

“Bring me my briefcase, will you? I want to jot down some ideas. There’s lots I could be doing in bed.”

“I picked out some of those pears you like.”

“No, no, just my briefcase, and that pen on the desk in my study. I’m going to see if my fingers are up to writing yet.”

He told Luke, “Work is what I need. I’ve been starved for work. It’s made me a little snappish.”

Luke scratched his rib cage. He said, “That’s all right.”

“You make sure you get a job you enjoy, once you’re grown. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. That’s important.”

“I know.”

“Me, I deal with time,” said Cody. He accepted a ball-point pen from Ruth. “Time is my favorite thing of all.”

Luke loved it when his father talked about time.

“Time is my obsession: not to waste it, not to lose it. It’s like … I don’t know, an object, to me; something you can almost take hold of. If I could just collect enough of it in one clump, I always think. If I could pass it back and forth and sideways, you know? If only Einstein were right and time were a kind of river you could choose to step into at any place along the shore.”

He clicked his pen point in and out, frowning into space. “If they had a time machine, I’d go on it,” he said. “It wouldn’t much matter to me where. Past or future: just out of my time. Just someplace else.”

Luke felt a pang. “But then you wouldn’t know me,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Sure he would,” Ruth said briskly. She was opening the latches of Cody’s briefcase. “He’d take you with him. Only mind,” she told Cody, “if Luke goes too you’ve got to bring penicillin, and his hay fever pills, and his fluoride toothpaste, you hear?”

Cody laughed, but he didn’t say one way or another about taking Luke along.

That was the evening that Cody first got his strange notion. It came about so suddenly: they were playing Monopoly on Cody’s bed, the three of them, and Cody was winning as usual and offering Luke a loan to keep going. “Oh, well, no, I guess I’ve lost,” said Luke.

There was the briefest pause — a skipped beat. Cody looked over at Ruth, who was counting her deed cards. “He sounds just like Ezra,” he told her.

She frowned at Baltic Avenue.

“Didn’t you hear what he said? He said it just like Ezra.”

“Really?”

“Ezra would do that,” Cody told Luke. “Your Uncle Ezra. It was no fun beating him at all. He’d never take a loan and he wouldn’t mortgage the least little thing, not even a railroad or the waterworks. He’d just cave right in and give up.”

“Well, it’s only that … you can see that I’ve lost,” Luke said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Sometimes it’s more like you’re Ezra’s child, not mine.”

“Cody Tull! What a thought,” said Ruth.

But it was too late. The words hung in the air. Luke felt miserable; he had all he could do to finish the game. (He knew his father had never thought much of Ezra.) And Cody, though he dropped the subject, remained dissatisfied in some way. “Sit up straighter,” he kept telling Luke. “Don’t hunch. Sit straight. God. You look like a rabbit.”

As soon as he could, Luke said good night and went off to bed.

The following morning, everything was fine again. Cody did some more work on his papers and had another talk with Sloan. Ruth cooked a chicken for a nice cold summer supper. Anytime Luke wandered by, Cody said something cheerful to him. “Why so long in the face?” he’d ask, or, “Feeling bored, son?” It sounded funny, calling Luke “son.” Cody didn’t usually do that.

They all had lunch in the bedroom — sandwiches and potato salad, like a picnic. The telephone, buried among the sheets, started ringing halfway through the meal, and Cody said not to answer it. It was bound to be his mother, he said. They kept perfectly silent, as if the caller could somehow hear them. After the ringing stopped, though, Ruth said, “That poor, poor woman.”

“Poor!” Cody snorted.

“Aren’t we awful?”

“You wouldn’t call her poor if you knew her better.”

Luke went back to his room and sorted through his old model airplanes. His parents’ voices drifted after him. “Listen,” Cody was telling Ruth. “This really happened. For my mother’s birthday I saved up all my money, fourteen dollars. And Ezra didn’t have a penny, see …”

Luke scrabbled through his wooden footlocker, the one piece of furniture that really belonged to him. It had accompanied all their moves since before he could remember. He was hunting the missing wing of a jet. He didn’t find the wing but he did find a leather bag of marbles — the kind he used to like, with spritzy bubbles like ginger ale inside them. And a slingshot made from a strip of inner tube. And a tonette — a dusty black plastic whistle on which, for Mother’s Day back in first grade, he’d played “White Coral Bells” along with his classmates. He tried it now: White coral bells, upon a slender stalk … It returned to him, note by note. He rose and went to his parents’ room to play it through to the end. Lilies of the valley deck my—

His father said, “I can’t stand it.”

Luke lowered the tonette.

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Cody asked. “Are you determined to torment me?”

“Huh?”

“Cody, honey …” Ruth said.

“You’re haunting me, isn’t that it? I can’t get away from him! I spend half my life with meek-and-mild Ezra and his blasted wooden whistle; I make my escape at last, and now look: here we go again. It’s like a conspiracy! Like some kind of plot where someone decided, long before I was born, I would live out my days surrounded by people who were … nicer than I am, just naturally nicer without even having to try, people that other people preferred; and everywhere I go there’s something, just that goddamn forgiving smile or some demented folk song floating out a window—”

“Cody, Luke will be thinking you have lost your senses,” Ruth said.

“And you!” Cody told her. “Look at you! Ah, Lord,” he said. “Some people fit together forever, don’t they? And you haven’t a hope in heaven of prying them apart. Married or not, you’ve always loved Ezra better than me.”

“Cody, what are you talking about?”

“Admit it,” Cody said. “Isn’t Ezra the real, true father of Luke?”

There was a silence.

“You didn’t say that. You couldn’t have,” Ruth told him.

“Admit it!”

“You know you don’t seriously believe such a thing.”

“Isn’t it the truth? Tell me! I won’t get angry, I promise.”

Luke went back to his room and closed the door.

All that afternoon he lay on his bed, rereading an old horse book from his childhood because he didn’t have