Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (31 page)

He tried to picture his cousins—Aunt Jenny’s children—but only came up with another room: his cousin Becky’s ruffled bedroom, with its throng of shabby stuffed animals densely encircling her bed. How could she sleep? he had wondered. But she told him she had no trouble sleeping at all; and whenever she went away to spend the night, she said, she took the whole menagerie in a giant canvas suitcase and set it out first thing around the new bed, even before unpacking her pajamas; and most of her friends did the same. It was Luke’s first inkling that
girls were different. He was mystified and charmed, and he treated her protectively for the rest of that short visit—though she was a year older than he and half a head taller.

If Ezra were really his father, Luke thought, then Luke could live in Baltimore where houses were dark and deep and secretive. Relatives would surround him—a loving grandma, funny Aunt Jenny, those rafts of cousins. Ezra would let him help out in his restaurant. He would talk about food and how people need to be fed with care; Luke could hear his ambling way of speaking. Yes, now he had it: the memory homed in. Ezra wore a flannel shirt of soft blue plaid, washed into oblivion. His hair was yellow … why! It was Luke’s kind of yellow, all streaky and layered. And his eyes were Luke’s kind of gray, a full shade lighter than Cody’s, and his skin had that same golden cast that caused it to blend into his hair almost without demarcation.

Luke let himself believe in some unimaginable moment between Ruth and Ezra, fourteen years ago. He skipped across it quickly to the time when Ezra would arrive to claim him. “You’re old enough to be told now, son …”

Knitting this scene in the dark, doubling back to correct a false note or racing forward to a good part, Luke forgot himself and took the pillow off his head. Instantly, he heard Cody’s voice behind the wall. “Everything I’ve ever wanted, Ezra got it. Anything in life I wanted. Even things I thought I had won, Ezra won in the end. And he didn’t even seem to be trying; that’s the hell of it.”

“You won the damn
Monopoly
games, didn’t you?” Luke shouted.

Cody said nothing.

The next morning, Cody seemed unusually quiet. Ruth took him into the doctor’s to get his walking cast—a moment they’d been waiting for, but Cody didn’t act interested now. Luke had to go along to serve as a crutch. He flinched when Cody first laid his heavy arm cast across his shoulders; he felt there was
some danger hovering. But Cody was a dead weight, grunting as he walked, evidently thinking about other matters. He heaved himself into the car and stared bleakly ahead of him. In the doctor’s waiting room, while Luke and his mother read magazines, Cody just sat empty faced. And after he got his walking cast, he hobbled back to the car unassisted, ignoring Luke’s offer of help. He fell into bed as soon as they reached home and lay gazing at the ceiling. “Cody, honey? Remember the doctor said to give that leg some exercise,” Ruth told him.

He didn’t answer.

Luke went out to the yard and kicked at the grass a while as if he were hunting for something. Next door, a cluster of toddlers in their wading pool stared at him. He wanted to shout, “Turn away! Stop looking at me; you have no business.” But instead it was he who turned, wandering out of the yard and down the street. More wading pools; more round-eyed, judging stares. A Welsh corgi, squat and dignified, bustled down the sidewalk, followed by a lady in a flowing caftan. “Toulouse! Toulouse!” she called. The heat was throbbing; it almost breathed. Luke’s face became filmed with sweat and his T-shirt stuck to his back. He kept wiping his upper lip. He passed rows of colonial houses similar to his, each with some object featured like a museum piece in the living-room window: a bulbous lamp, a china horse, a vase of stiff-necked marigolds. (And what did his own window have? He couldn’t recall. He wanted to say a weeping fig tree, but that was from an apartment they’d rented, three or four towns back.) Sprinklers spun lazily. It was a satisfaction to stop, from time to time, and watch a lawn soak up the spangled water drops.

Now here came some busy lady with her baby in a stroller, small children all around her. He crossed the street to avoid them, took a right turn, and arrived on Willow Bough Avenue with its whizzing traffic, discount drugstores, real estate offices and billboards and service stations. He waited at an intersection, pondering where to go next. One of the things about moving so often was, he never really knew where he was. He believed
his sense of direction had been blunted. He couldn’t understand how some people seemed to carry a kind of detailed, internal map of the town they lived in.

A Trailways bus zipped past him reading B
ALTIMORE
. Imagine hailing it. (Could you hail a Trailways bus?) Imagine boarding it—assuming he had the money, which he didn’t—and riding off to Baltimore, arriving at Ezra’s restaurant and strolling in. “Here I am.” “
There
you are,” Ezra would say. Oh, if only he’d brought his money! Another bus passed, but that was a local. Then a gigantic truck drew up, braking for an amber light. Luke, as if obeying orders, stuck out a thumb. The driver leaned across the seat and opened the door on the passenger side. “Hop on in,” he told Luke.

No
RIDERS
, a label on the window read. None of this was happening. Slowly, like someone being pushed from behind, Luke climbed into the cab. It was filled with loud music and a leathery, sweaty, masculine smell that made him feel instantly comfortable. He slammed the door and settled back. The driver—a knife-faced man, unshaven—squinted up at the traffic light and asked, “Whereabouts you headed, son?”

Luke said, “Baltimore, Maryland.”

“Folks know you’re going?”

“Sure,” said Luke.

The driver shot him a glance.

“Why, my folks … 
live
in Baltimore,” Luke told him.

“Oh, then.”

The truck started up again. They rumbled past the shopping mall where Luke’s mother went for groceries. A green sign swung overhead, listing points north. “Well,” said the driver, adjusting his mirror, “I tell you: I can carry you as far as Richmond. That’s where I have to veer west.”

“Okay,” said Luke.

Even Richmond, after all, was farther than he’d ever meant to go.

On the radio, Billy Swan was singing “I Can Help.” The driver hummed along in a creaky voice that never 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 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.