Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

quite hit the right note. His thin gray hair, Luke saw, had recently been combed; it lay close to his skull in damp parallel lines. He held a cigarette between his fingers but he didn’t light it. His fingernails were so thick and ridged, they might have been cut from yellow corduroy.

“In the summer of fifty-six,” he said, “I was passing along this very road with my wife in a Safeway grocery truck when she commences to go into labor. Not but eight months gone and she proceeds directly into labor. Lord God! I recall to this day. She says, ‘Clement, I think it’s my time.’ Well, I was young then. Inexperienced. I thought a baby came one-two-three. I thought we didn’t have a moment to spare. And also, you know what they say: a seven-month baby will turn out good but an eight-month baby won’t make it. I can’t figure why that should be. So anyhow, I put on the brakes. I’m shaking all over. My brake foot is so shaky we’re just wobbling down the highway. You see that sign over there? Leading off to the right? See that hospital sign? Well, that is where I taken her. Straight up that there road. I never come by here but what I recall it.”

Luke looked politely at the hospital sign, and then swiveled his neck to go on looking after they had passed. It was the only response he could think of.

“Labor lasted thirty-two hours,” the driver said. “Safeway thought I’d hijacked their rig.”

“Well,” said Luke, “but the baby got born okay.”

“Sure,” the driver told him. “Five-pound girl. Lisa Michelle.” He thought a moment. Then he said, “She died later on, though.”

Luke cleared his throat.

“Crib death is what they call it nowadays,” said the driver. He swerved around a trailer. “Ever hear of it?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“Sudden crib death. Six months old. Light of my life. Bright as a button, too — loved me to bits. I’d come home and she would just rev right up — wheel her arms and legs like a windmill soon as she set eyes on me. Then she went and died.”

“Well, gosh,” said Luke.

“Now I got others,” the driver said. “Want to see them? Turn down that sun visor over your head.”

Luke turned down the visor. A color photo, held in place by a pink plastic clothespin, showed three plain girls in dresses so new and starchy that it must have been Easter Sunday.

“The youngest is near about your age,” the driver said. “What are you: thirteen, fourteen?” He honked at a station wagon that had cut too close in front. “They’re nice girls,” he said, “but I don’t know. It’s not the same, somehow. Seems like I lost the … attachment. Lost the knack of getting attached. I mean, I like them; shoot, I love them, but I just don’t have the … seems to me I can’t get up the energy no more.”

A lady on the radio was advertising Chevrolets. The driver switched stations and Barbra Streisand came on, showing off as usual. “But you ought to see my wife!” the driver said. “Isn’t it amazing? She loves those kids like the very first one. She just started in all over. I don’t know what to make of her. I look at her and I can’t believe it. ‘Dotty,’ I say, ‘really it all comes down to nothing. It’s not for anything,’ I say. ‘Dotty, how come you can go on like this?’ See, me, I never bounced back so good. I pass that hospital road and you know? I halfway believe if I made the turnoff, things would be just like before. Dotty’d be holding my hand, and Lisa Michelle would be waiting to be born.”

Luke rubbed his palms on his jeans. The driver said, “Well, now. Listen to me! Just gabbing along; I guess you think I talk too much.” And for the rest of the trip he was quiet, only whistling through his teeth when the radio played a familiar song.

He said goodbye near Richmond, going out of his way to leave Luke at a ramp just past a rest center. “You wait right here and you’ll get a ride in no time,” he said. “Here they’re traveling slow anyhow, and won’t mind stopping.” Then he raised his hand stiffly and drove off. From a distance, his truck looked as bright and chunky as a toy.

But it seemed he took some purpose with him, some atmosphere of speed and assurance. All at once … what was Luke doing here? What could he be thinking of? He saw himself, alone in the fierce white glare of the sun, cocking his thumb at an amateurish angle on a road in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t even visualize how far he had to go. (He’d never done well in geography.) Although it was hot — the peak of the afternoon, by now — he wished for a windbreaker: protection. He wished for his billfold, not so much for the small amount of money it held as for the i.d. card that had come with it when he bought it. If he were killed on this road, how would they know whom to notify? He wondered if — homeless, parentless — he would have to wear these braces on his teeth for the rest of his life. He pictured himself as an old man, still hiding a mouthful of metal whenever he smiled.

Then an out-of-date, fin-tailed car stopped next to him and the door swung open. “Need a lift?” the driver asked. In the back, a little tow-headed boy bounced up and down, calling, “Come on! Come on! Get in and have a ride. Come on in and ride with us!”

Luke got in. He found the driver smiling at him — a suntanned man in blue jeans, with deep lines around his eyes. “My name’s Dan Smollett,” he said. “That’s Sammy in the back seat.”

“I’m Luke.”

“We’re heading toward D.C. That do you any good?”

“It’s fine,” said Luke. “I guess,” he added, still unsure of his geography. “I’m on my way to Baltimore.”

“Baltimore!” said Sammy, still bouncing. “Daddy, can we go to Baltimore?”

“We have to go to Washington, Sammy.”

“Don’t we know someone in Baltimore too? Kitty? Susie? Betsy?”

“Now, Sammy, settle down, please.”

“We’re looking up Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy told Luke.

“Oh,” said Luke.

“We just came from Raleigh and saw Carla.”

“No, no, Carla was in Durham,” his father told him. “It was DeeDee you saw in Raleigh.”

“Carla was nice,” said Sammy. “She was the best of the bunch. You would’ve liked her, Luke.”

“I would?”

“It’s too bad she was married.”

“Sammy, Luke doesn’t want to hear about our private lives.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Luke. He wasn’t sure what he was hearing, anyhow.

They were back on the freeway by now, staying in the slow lane — perhaps because of the grinding noise that came whenever Dan accelerated. Luke had never been in a car as old as this one. Its interior was a dusty gray felt, the floors awash in paper cups and Frito bags. The glove compartment — doorless — spilled out maps that were splitting at the seams, along with loose change, Lifesavers, and miniature tractors and dump trucks. In the rear, Sammy bounced among blankets and grayish pillows. “Settle down,” his father kept saying, but it didn’t do any good. “He gets a little restless, along about afternoon,” Dan told Luke.

“How long have you been traveling?” Luke asked.

“Oh, three weeks or so.”

“Three weeks!”

“We left just after summer school. I’m a high school English teacher; I had to teach this grammar course first.”

“Lookit here,” Sammy said, and on his next bounce upward he thrust a wad of paper into Luke’s face. Evidently, someone had been chewing on it. It was four sheets, mangled together, bearing typed columns of names and addresses. “Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy said.

Luke stared.

“They are not,” said his father. “Really, Sammy.” He told Luke, “That’s my graduating class in high school. Boys and girls. Last year they had a reunion; I didn’t go but they sent us this address list.”

“Now we’re looking up the girls,” Sammy said.

“Not all the girls, Sammy.”

“The girls that you went out with.”

“My wife is divorcing me,” Dan told Luke. He seemed to think this explained everything. He faced forward