When he’d hung up, he told Luke, “They’ll be here as soon as possible. He’d rather come get you now, he said.”
Luke felt a little notch of dread beginning in his stomach. He wondered how angry his father was. He wondered how he could have thought of doing this — coming all this distance! So alone! It seemed like something he had floated through in a dream.
His grandmother’s house still had its burned-toast smell, its dusky corners, its atmosphere of secrecy. If you moved in here, Luke thought, wouldn’t you go on finding unexpected cubbyholes and closets for weeks or even months afterward? (Yes, imagine moving in. Imagine sharing the cozy living room, Grandma’s peaceful kitchen.) His grandmother skittered around him, adding tiny dishes of food to what was already on the table. Ezra kept telling her, “Mother, take it easy. Don’t fuss so.” But Luke enjoyed the fuss. He liked the way she would stop in the midst of preparing something to come running over and cup his face. “Look at you! Just look!” She was shorter than he was, now. And she had aged a great deal, or else he’d been too young before to notice. There was something scratchy and flyaway about her little screwed-tight topknot, once blond but now colorless, and her face sectioned deeply by pockets of lines and her wrinkled, spotted hands. He saw how much she loved him, purely from her hungry touch on his cheeks, and he wondered how his father could have misjudged her so.
“It’s not right that your parents just come and take you back,” she told him. “We’ll make them stay. We’ll just make them. I’ll change the sheets in Jenny’s old room. You can have the guest room. Oh, Luke! I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was you if I’d seen you on the street; it’s been that long. Though I would have said … yes, I would have thought to myself as I passed, ‘My, that child reminds me of my Cody years ago; doesn’t he? Just fairer haired, is all.’ I would have had this little pang and then forgotten, and then later maybe, making tea at home, I’d think, ‘Wait now, something was disturbing me back there …’ ”
She tried to pour a bowl of leftover green beans into a saucepan but missed, and slopped most of the liquid onto the counter, and swabbed it with wads of paper towels while laughing at herself. “What an old lady! What a silly old lady, you’re thinking. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. No, no, Ezra, I can manage, dear.”
“Mother, why don’t you let me take over?”
“I can certainly manage in my own kitchen, Ezra,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to go back to the restaurant? No telling what those people of yours are up to.”
“You just want to have Luke to yourself,” Ezra teased her.
“Oh, I admit it! I admit it!”
She turned on the flame beneath the saucepan. “Everything is coming together,” she told Luke. “I’ve been so worried, just sick with worry, picturing Cody in pain and
“
“And so,” she went on hastily, “we get to see him after all. He’s really going to show himself. But, Luke. Be truthful. He isn’t, he’s not … scarred or anything, is he? His face, I mean. He hasn’t got any disfiguring scars.”
“Just bruises,” said Luke. “Nothing that’ll last. In fact,” he added, “they’re mostly gone by now.”
It surprised him to find that he had held on to the picture of a broken Cody all this time, when really the bruises had faded, come to think of it, and the swellings had disappeared and the hair had almost completely grown over his head wound.
“He always was so handsome,” Pearl said. “It was part of his identity.”
Ezra moved around the table, setting out plates and silverware. The saucepan hissed on the stove. Luke sat down on a kitchen chair and tipped back against a radiator. Its sharply sculptured ribs and tall pipes made him think of old-fashioned, comforting places — a church he’d visited with a kindergarten friend, for instance, or his second- grade classroom, where once, when a snowstorm started during lunch hour, he had imagined a blizzard developing and keeping all the children snugly marooned for days, drinking cups of soup sent up from the cafeteria.
After supper, he and Pearl watched TV while Ezra went back to check the restaurant. Pearl kept the living room completely dark, lit only by the flickering blue TV screen. Both the front windows were open and they could hear the noises from the street — a game of prisoner’s base, a Good Humor bell, a woman calling her children. Around nine o’clock, when the twilight had finally given way to night and the stuffy air had cooled some, Luke caught the distinctive, tightly woven hum of a Mercedes drawing up to the curb. He tensed. Pearl, who wouldn’t have recognized the sound, went on placidly watching TV. “Who’s that, dear?” she asked him, but it was some actor she referred to; she was peering at the television set. There were footsteps across the porch. “Eh?” she said. “Already?” She rose, fumbling first for the arms of her chair in two or three blind passes. She opened the front door and said, “Cody?”
Cody stood looming, larger than Luke had expected, his arm and leg casts glowing whitely in the dark. “Hello, Mother,” he said.
“Why, Cody, let me look at you! And Ruth: hello, dear. Cody, are you all right? I can’t make out your face. Are you really feeling better?”
“I’m fine,” Cody told her. He kissed her cheek and then limped in.
“Hey, Dad,” Luke said, rising awkwardly.
Cody said, “May I ask what you thought you were up to?”
“Well, I don’t know …”
“Don’t know! Is that all you have to say? You scared the hell out of us! Your mother’s been beside herself.”
“Oh, honey, we were so worried!” Ruth cried. She pulled him close and kissed him. Her dress — a magenta polyester that she wore on special occasions — crumpled its sharp ruffles against his chest. He smelled her familiar, grassy smell that he’d never really noticed before.
“We near about lost our minds,” Ruth told Pearl. “I believe I must’ve aged a quarter-century. I felt if I looked out that same front window one more time I’d go mad, go stark, raving mad — same old curve in the road, same old sidewalk, empty. You just don’t know.”
“I do know. I do know,” said Pearl.
She was feeling for the switch to a lamp that sat on a table. The silk shade rustled and tilted. Then Ezra arrived in the door. “Cody?” he said. “Is that you?” He strode in fast and first encountered Ruth — almost ran her down — and seized her hand and pumped it. “Good to see you, Ruth,” he said. Meanwhile, Cody found the switch for his mother and turned the lamp on. It was coincidental; he was only being helpful, but Luke felt he’d turned on the lamp to
Cody went on studying Ruth and Ezra. “He says he can’t use them,” said Ruth. “He says with his opposite arm in a cast …” She reached out and smoothed Luke’s T-shirt, which didn’t need smoothing. She pushed his hair off his forehead. “And now that he’s got this walking cast …” she said absently. “Oh, Luke, sweetheart, didn’t you think you’d be missed?”
Cody turned away and sank into an armchair. “Would you two like some iced tea?” Pearl asked.
“No, thanks,” said Cody.
“Or coffee? A nice cup of coffee?”
“No! God. Nothing,” said Cody.
Luke expected Pearl to look hurt, but she only gave Cody a curiously satisfied smile. “You always were a grump when you weren’t feeling well,” she told him.
In fact, how surprising this whole visit was! — low-keyed and uneventful, even boring. Luke started out sitting rigidly erect, but gradually he relaxed and let his attention drift to a variety show on TV. The grown-ups murmured around him without any emphasis, discussing money. Cody wanted Pearl to get a new furnace; he would pay for it, he said. Pearl said she had a little savings, but Cody kept insisting, as if there were something gratifying, something triumphant in buying a person a furnace. Oh, money, money, money. You’d think they could come up
