Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

with some more interesting subject.

Luke pressed a lever in his armchair and found himself flung back, his feet raised suddenly on some sort of footrest. Now Pearl was asking where they would go after Petersburg, and Cody was saying he didn’t know; Sloan and he were hoping to take on this cosmetics firm down in … His reasonable tone of voice made Luke feel hoodwinked, betrayed. Why, all this time he’d been hearing such terrible tales! He’d been told of such ill will and bitterness! But Cody and Pearl conversed pleasantly, like any civilized adults. They discussed whether the North or the South was a better place to live. They had a mild, dull, uninvested sort of argument about it, till it emerged that Pearl was assuming Baltimore was North and Cody was assuming it was South. She asked if this new factory might be as dangerous as the last one. “Any place is dangerous,” said Cody, “if idiots are running it.”

“Cody, I worry so,” she told him. “If you knew how frantic I’ve been! Hearing my oldest, my firstborn son is in critical condition and I’m not allowed to come see him.”

“Critical condition! I’m walking around, aren’t I?”

“The walking wounded,” she said, and she threw her hands up. “Isn’t it ironic? I’d always thought disasters were … lower class. I would read these hard-luck stories in the paper: lady evicted when she’s trying to raise the seven children of her daughter who was shot to death in a bar, and one of the children’s retarded and another has to be taken for dialysis so many times per week by city bus, transferring twice … well, of course I feel sorry for such people but also, I don’t know, impatient, as if they’d brought it on themselves some way. There’s a limit, I want to tell them; only so much of life is luck. But now look: my eyesight’s poorly and my oldest son’s had a serious accident and his son’s run away from home for reasons we’re not told, and I haven’t seen my daughter in weeks because she’s all tied up with her little girl who’s got that disease, what’s it called, Anor Exia—”

“How’s Becky doing, anyhow?” Cody asked, and Luke had an image of Cody’s reaching into a wild snarl of strings and tugging on the one short piece that wasn’t all tangled with the others.

“No one knows,” Pearl said, rocking.

Ruth massaged her forehead, which had the strained, roughened look it always got after a difficult day. Ezra laughed at something on TV. Cody, who was watching the two of them, sighed sharply and turned back to his mother.

“We’d better be going,” he told her.

She straightened. “What?” she said. “You’re leaving?”

“We’ve got a long drive.”

“But that’s exactly why you’re staying!” she told him. “Rest tonight. Start fresh in the morning.”

“We can’t,” said Cody.

“Why can’t you?”

“We have to … ah, feed the dog.”

“I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“A Doberman.”

“But Dobermans are vicious!”

“That’s why we better hurry back and feed him,” Cody said. “Don’t want him eating up the neighbors.”

He reached out a hand toward Luke, and Luke clambered off the reclining chair to help him to his feet. When Cody’s fingers closed on his, Luke imagined some extra tightness — a secret handshake, a nudge at the joke they’d put over on Pearl. He kept his face deliberately expressionless.

“Listen, all,” Ezra said. “It isn’t long till Thanksgiving, you know.”

Everybody stared at him.

“Will you come back here for Thanksgiving? We could have a family dinner at the restaurant.”

“Oh, Ezra, no telling where we’ll be by then,” said Cody.

“What,” said Pearl. “You never heard of airplanes? Amtrak? Modern transportation?”

“We’ll talk about it when the time gets closer,” Cody said, patting her shoulder. “Ruth, you got everything? So long, Ezra, let me know how it’s going.”

There was a flurry of hugs and handshakes. Later, Luke wasn’t sure he’d said thank you to Ezra — though what did he want to thank him for, exactly? Something or other … They made their way down the sidewalk and into Cody’s car, which still had the stale, blank smell of air-conditioned air. Everyone called out parts of sentences, as if trying to give the impression that they had so much left to say to each other, there wasn’t room to fit it all in. “Now, you be sure to—” “It sure was good to—” “Tell Jenny we wish—” “And drive defensively, hear?”

They pulled away from the curb, waving through the window. Pearl and Ezra fell behind. Luke, sitting in back, faced forward and found his father at the wheel. Ruth was in the passenger seat. “Mom?” Luke said. “Don’t you think you ought to drive?”

“He insisted,” Ruth said. “He drove all the way here, too.” She turned and looked at Luke meaningfully, over the back of the seat. “He said he wanted it to be him that drove to get you.”

“Oh,” said Luke.

What was she waiting for? She went on looking at him for some time, but then gave up and turned away again. Trying his best, Luke sat forward to observe how Cody managed.

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t be all that hard,” he said, “except for shifting the gears.”

“Shifting’s easy,” Cody told him.

“Oh.”

“And luckily there’s no clutch.”

“No.”

They passed rows and rows of houses, many with their porches full of people rocking in the dark. They turned down a block where there were stoops instead of porches, white stoops set close to the street. On one of these a whole family perched, with a beer cooler and an oscillating fan and a baby in a mesh crib on the sidewalk. A TV sat on a car hood at the curb so if you happened by on foot, you’d have to cross between TV and audience, muttering, “Excuse me, please,” just as if you’d walked through someone’s living room. Luke gazed back at that family as long as they were in sight. They were replaced by a strip of bars and cafes, and then by an unlit alley.

“Isn’t it funny,” Luke told his father, “no one’s ever asked you to reorganize anything in Baltimore.”

“Very funny,” Cody said.

“We could live with Grandma then, couldn’t we?”

Cody said nothing.

They left the city for the expressway, entering a world of high, cold lights and a blue-black sky. Ruth slid slowly against the window. Her small head bobbed with every dip in the road.

“Mom’s asleep,” Luke said.

“She’s tired,” said Cody.

Perhaps he meant it as a reproach. Was this where the scolding started? Luke kept very quiet for a while. But what Cody said next was, “It wears her out, that house. Your grandma’s so difficult to deal with.”

“Grandma’s not difficult.”

“Not for you, maybe. For other people she is. For your mother. Grandma believes your mother is ‘scrappy.’ She told me that, once. Called her ‘scrappy and hoydenish.’ ” He laughed, recalling something, so that Luke started smiling expectantly. “One time,” Cody said, “—I bet you don’t remember this — your mother and I had this silly little spat and she packed you up and ran off to Ezra. Then as soon as she got to the station, she started thinking what life would be like with your grandma and she called and asked me to come drive her home.”

Luke’s smile faded. “Ran off to where?” he asked.

“To Ezra. But never mind, it was only one of those—”

“She didn’t run to Ezra. She was planning to go to her folks,” Luke said.

“What folks?” Cody asked him.

Luke didn’t know.

“She’s an orphan,” Cody said. “What folks?”

“Well, maybe—”

“She was planning to go to Ezra,” Cody said. “I can see it now! I can picture how they’d take up their marriage, right where ours left off. Oh, I believe I’ve always had the feeling it wasn’t my marriage, anyhow. It was someone else’s. It was theirs. Sometimes I seemed to enjoy it better when I imagined I was seeing it through