Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

someone else’s eyes.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Luke asked him.

“All I meant was—”

“What are you, crazy? How come you go on hanging on to these things, year after year after year?”

“Now, wait a minute, now …”

“Mom?” Luke shook her shoulder. “Mom! Wake up!”

Ruth’s head sagged over to the other side.

“Let her rest,” Cody said. “Goddammit, Luke—”

“Wake up, Mom!”

“Hmm,” said Ruth, not waking.

“Mom? I want to ask you. Mom? Remember when you packed me up and left Dad?”

“Mm.”

“Remember?”

“Yes,” she murmured, curling tighter.

“Where were we going to go, Mom?”

She raised her head, with her hair all frowsy, and gave him a blurry, dazed stare. “What?” she said. “Garrett County, where my uncle lives. Who wants to know?”

“Nobody. Go back to sleep,” Cody told her.

She went back to sleep. Cody rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

They sped through a corridor of light that was bounded on both sides by the deepest darkness. They met and passed solitary cars that disappeared in an instant. Luke’s eyelids drooped.

“What I mean to say,” Cody said. “What I drove all this way to say …”

But then he trailed off. And when he started speaking again, it was on a whole different subject: time. How time was underestimated. How time was so important and all. Luke felt relieved. He listened comfortably, lulled by his father’s words. “Everything,” his father said, “comes down to time in the end — to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? Even big things — even mourning a death: aren’t you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos — ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced … Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”

He didn’t seem to expect an answer, which was lucky. Luke was too sleepy to manage one. He felt heavy, weighted with other people’s stories. He imagined he was slipping or falling. He believed he was gliding away, streaming down a great, wide, light-filled river of time along with all the people he had met today. He let his head nod over, and he closed his eyes and slept.

9 Apple Apple

One morning Ezra Tull got up and shaved, brushed his teeth, stepped into his trousers, and encountered a lump in the bend of his right thigh. His fingers glanced over it accidentally and faltered and returned. In the bedroom mirror, his broad, fair face had a frozen look. The word cancer came on its own, as if someone had whispered it into his ear, but what caused his shocked expression was the thought that flew in after it: All right. Let it happen. I’ll go ahead and die.

He shook that away, of course. He was forty-six years old, a calm and sensible man, and later he would make an appointment with Dr. Vincent. Meanwhile he put on a shirt, and buttoned it, and unrolled a pair of socks. Twice, without planning to, he tested the lump again with his fingertips. It was nearly the size of an acorn, sensitive but not painful. It rolled beneath his skin as smoothly as an eyeball.

It wasn’t that he really wanted to die. Naturally not. He was only giving in to a passing mood, he decided as he went downstairs; this summer hadn’t been going well. His mother, whose vision had been failing since 1975, was now (in 1979) almost totally blind, but still did not fully admit it, which made it all the harder to care for her; and his brother was too far away and his sister too busy to offer him much help. His restaurant was floundering even more than usual; his finest cook had quit because her horoscope advised it; and a heat wave seemed to be stupefying the entire city of Baltimore. Things were so bad that the most inconsequential sights served to confirm his despair — the neighbor’s dog panting on the sidewalk, or his mother’s one puny hydrangea bush wilting and sagging by two o’clock every afternoon. Even the postman signified catastrophe; his wife had been murdered in a burglary last spring, and now he lugged his leather pouch through the neighborhood as if it were heavy beyond endurance, as if it would eventually drag him to a halt. His feet went slower and slower; his shoulders bent closer to the ground. Every day the mail arrived later.

Ezra stood with his coffee at the window and watched the postman moping past and wondered if there were any point to life.

Then his mother came downstairs, planting her feet just so. “Oh, look,” she said, “what a sunny morning!” She could feel it, he supposed — warming her skin in squares when she stood next to him at the window. Or perhaps she could even see it, since evidently she still distinguished light from dark. But her dress was done up wrong. She had drawn her wispy gray-blond hair into its customary bun, and deftly applied a single spark of pink to the center of her dry, pursed lips, but one side of her collar stuck up at an angle and the flowered material pouched outward, showing her slip in the gap between two buttons.

“It’s going to be another scorcher,” Ezra told her.

“Oh, poor Ezra, I hate to see you go to work in this.”

All she said carried references to sight. He couldn’t tell if she planned it that way.

She let him bring her a cup of coffee but she turned down breakfast, and instead sat beside him in the living room while he read the paper. This was their only time together — morning and noon, after which he left for the restaurant and did not return till very late at night, long past her bedtime. He had trouble imagining what she did in his absence. Sometimes he telephoned from work and she always sounded so brisk—“Just fixing myself some iced tea,” she would say, or “Sorting through my stockings.” But in the background he would hear the ominous, syrupy strains of organ music from some television soap opera, and he suspected that she simply sat before the TV much of the day, with a cardigan draped graciously over her shoulders even in this heat and her chilled hands folded in her lap. Certainly she saw no friends; she had none. As near as he could recall, she had never had friends. She had lived through her children; the gossip they brought was all she knew of the outside world, and their activities provided her only sense of motion. Even back when she worked at the grocery store, she had not consorted with the customers or the other cashiers. And now that she had retired, none of her fellow workers came to visit her.

No, this was the high point of her day, no doubt: these slow midmorning hours, the rustling of Ezra’s paper, his spotty news reports. “Another taxi driver mugged, it says here.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“Another shoot-out down on the Block.”

“Where will it all end?” his mother wondered.

“Terrorist bomb in Madrid.”

Newspapers, letters, photos, magazines — those he could help her with. With those she let herself gaze straight ahead, blank eyed, while he acted as interpreter. But in all other situations, she was fiercely independent. What, exactly, was the nature of their understanding? She admitted only that her sight was not what it had once been — that it was impaired enough to make reading a nuisance. “She’s blind,” her doctor said, and she reported, “He thinks I’m blind,” not arguing but managing to imply, somehow, that this was a matter of opinion — or of will, of what you’re willing to allow and what you’re not. Ezra had learned to offer clues in the casual, slantwise style that she would accept. If he were to say, for instance, “It’s raining, Mother,” when they were setting out for