Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

again, and Luke said, “Oh.” Another rest center floated by, a distant forest of Texaco and Amoco signs. A moving van honked obligingly when Sammy gave the signal out the window. Sammy squealed and bounced all the harder — a spiky mass of bones and striped T-shirt, flapping shorts, torn sneakers.

“What year are you in school?” Dan asked Luke.

“I’m going into ninth grade.”

“Read any Hemingway? Catcher in the Rye? What are they giving you to read?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m new,” said Luke.

He could easily picture Dan as a teacher. He would wear his jeans in the classroom. He’d be one of those casual, comradely types that Luke had never quite trusted. Better to have him in suit and tie; at least then you knew where you stood.

“In Washington,” Sammy said, “there’s two girls, Patty and Lena.”

“Don’t say girls, say women,” Dan told him.

“Patty Sears and Lena Sparrow.”

“I’m better on the S’s,” Dan said to Luke. “They were in my homeroom.”

“Lena we hear is separated,” Sammy said.

Luke said, “But what do you do when you visit? What is there to do?”

“Oh, sit around,” Sammy said. “Stay a few days if they ask us. Play with their dogs and their cats and their kids. Most of them do have kids. And husbands.”

“Well, then,” said Luke. “If they’ve got husbands …”

“But we don’t know that till we get there. Do we,” Sammy said.

“Sammy’s a little mixed up,” Dan said. “It’s not as though we’re hunting replacements. We’re just traveling. This divorce has come as a shock and I’m just, oh, traveling back. I’m visiting old friends.”

“But only girl friends,” Sammy pointed out.

“They’re girls I used to get along fine with. Not sweethearts, necessarily. But they liked me; they thought I was fine. Or at least, they seemed to. I assumed they did. I don’t know). Maybe they were just acting polite. Maybe I was a mess all along.”

Luke couldn’t think what to say.

“So listen!” Dan told him. “You read The Great Gatsby yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about Lord of the Flies? You get to Lord of the Flies? ”

“I haven’t read anything,” said Luke. “I’ve been moved around a lot; anyplace I go they’re doing Silas Marner.”

This seemed to throw Dan into some kind of depression. His shoulders sagged and he said no more.

Sammy finally stopped bouncing and sat back with a Jack and Jill. Pages turned, rattling in the hot wind that blew through the car. On the seat between Dan and Luke, Dan’s address list fluttered. It didn’t seem very long. Four or five sheets of paper, two columns to a sheet; it would be used up in no time. Luke said, “Um …”

Dan looked over at him.

“You must have gone to college,” Luke said.

“Yes.”

“Or even graduate school.”

“Just college.”

“Don’t you have some addresses from there?”

“College isn’t the same,” said Dan. “I wouldn’t be going far enough back. Why,” he said, struck by a thought, “college is where I met my wife!”

“Oh, I see,” Luke said.

Outside Washington, Dan stopped the car to let him off. On the horizon was a haze of buildings that Dan said was Alexandria. “Alexandria, Virginia?” Luke asked. He didn’t understand what that had to do with Washington. But Dan, who seemed in a hurry, was already glancing in his side-view mirror. Sammy hung out the window calling, “Bye, Luke! When will I see you again? Will you come and visit when we find a place? Write me a letter, Luke!”

“Sure,” said Luke, waving. The car rolled off.

By now it must be four o’clock, at least, but it didn’t seem to Luke that he felt any cooler. His eyes ached from squinting in the sunlight. His hair had grown stringy and stiff. Something about this road, though — the foreign smells of tar and diesel fuel, or the roar of traffic — made him believe for the first time that he really was getting somewhere. He was confident he’d be picked up sooner or later. He thumbed a while, walked a few yards, stopped to thumb again. He had turned to begin another walk when a car slammed on its brakes, veering to the shoulder in front of him. “For God’s sake,” a woman called. “Get in this instant, you hear?”

He opened the door and got in. It was a Dodge, not nearly as old as Dan’s car but almost as worn-looking, as if it had been used a great deal. The woman inside was plump and fortyish. Her eyes were swollen and tears had streaked her cheeks, but he trusted her anyhow; you’d think she was his mother, the way she scolded him. “Are you out of your mind? Do you want to get killed? Do you know the kind of perverts in this world? Make sure your door’s shut. Lock it, dammit; we’re not in downtown Sleepy Hollow. Fasten your seat belt. Hook up your shoulder harness.”

He was happy to obey. He adjusted some complicated kind of buckle while the woman, sniffling, ground the gears and shot back into traffic. “What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Luke.”

“Well, Luke, are you a total idiot? Does your mother know you’re hitching rides? Where are your parents in all of this?”

“Oh, ah, Baltimore,” he said. “I don’t guess you would be going there.”

“God, no, what would I want with Baltimore?”

“Well, where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

“You don’t know?”

He looked at her. The tears were streaming down her cheeks again. “Um, maybe—” he said.

“Oh, relax. Never mind, I’ll take you on to Baltimore.”

“You will?”

“It’s better than circling the Beltway forever.”

“Golly, thanks,” he said.

“They’re letting infants out on their own these days.”

“I’m not an infant.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Sex crimes! Muggings! Murders! Things that make no sense.”

“So what? I’ve been traveling on my own a long time. Years,” he said. “Ever since I was born, almost.”

“For all you know,” she told him, “I could be holding you for ransom.”

This startled a laugh out of him. She glanced over and gave a sad smile. There was something reassuring about the comfortable mound of her stomach, the denim skirt riding up her stocky legs, the grayish-white tennis shoes. Periodically, she swabbed at the tip of her nose with her knuckles. He noticed that she wore a wedding ring, and had worn it for so long it looked embedded in her finger.

“Just two or three miles ahead, not a month ago,” she said, “a boy in a sports car stopped to pick up a girl and she smashed in his skull with a flashlight, rolled him down an embankment, and drove away in his sports car.”

“That proves it’s you doing something dangerous, not me,” he pointed out. (How easy it was to fall into the bantering, argumentative tone reserved for mothers!) “What did you pick me up for? I could be planning to kill you.”

“Oh, indeed,” she said, sniffling again. “You wouldn’t happen to have a Kleenex on you, by any chance?”

“No, sorry.”