Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (33 page)

“There is! Believe me,” he said. “But it’s new. They just did buy it, and I haven’t been there yet.”

“Look it up,” she told him.

She stopped so suddenly, he was glad he’d fastened his seat belt. A telephone booth stood beside them. “Go on! Look it up,” she told him. She must have thought she was calling his bluff.

Luke said, “All right, I will.”

Then in the phone booth—the old, fully enclosed kind, a glass and aluminum boxful of heat—he ran a finger past
Homeland Racquet Club, Homeseekers Realty
, and found himself so surprised by
Homesick Restaurant
that it might have been a bluff after all. “It’s on St. Paul Street,” he said when he came back to the car. “You can drop me off anywhere; I’ll find the number.”

But no, she had to take him to the doorstep, though it meant a good deal of doubling back because St. Paul, it turned out, was one-way and she kept miscalculating the cross streets. When she parked in front of the restaurant, she said, “Well, I’ll be! It exists.”

“Thank you for the ride,” Luke said.

She peered at him. “Are you going to be all right, Luke?” she asked.

“Of course I am.”

“And you’re certain your parents are here.”

“Of course they are.”

But she waited, anyhow. (It reminded him of the grade-school parties given by his classmates—his mother making sure he got in before she drove away.) He tried the restaurant’s door and found it locked. He would have to go around to the rear. The woman leaned out her window and called, “What’s the trouble, Luke?”

“I forgot, I have to use the kitchen entrance.”

“What if that’s locked, too?”

“It isn’t.”

“You listen, Luke,” she called to him. “Everything is changing; things aren’t safe like in the old days. Every alley in this city is full of muggers, are you hearing what I say? Every doorway and vacant building, Luke, every street in Baltimore.”

He waved and disappeared. A moment later he heard her car take off again—but reluctantly, without its usual verve, as if she were still absorbed in her catalogue of dangers.

He knew the restaurant so well, he must have carried its image constantly within him: its clatter of pans and crash of china, smell of cut celery simmering in butter, broom-shaped bundles of herbs dangling from the rafters, gallon jars of wrinkly Greek olives, bushel baskets of parsley, steaming black kettles watched devotedly by a boy no older than Luke. Beyond the kitchen, hardly separate from it, stretched the dining room with its white-draped tables and dusty sunbeams. There were so many decorations in the dining room—gifts and mementos, accumulated over the years—that Luke was always reminded of someone’s home, one of those teeming family houses where kindergarten drawings are taped above the mantel and then forgotten. He recognized the six-foot collage of Ezra’s hearts-of-palm salad, presented by an artist who often ate here, and he saw the
colored paper chain that he and his cousins had festooned around a light fixture for some long-ago Christmas dinner. (Ezra had never taken it down, though the dinner had broken off in a quarrel and the chain was now brittle and faded.) Luke knew that in one corner, out of his line of vision, sat a heavy antique bicycle that Ezra had bought in a Timonium flea market.
MERCURIO’S CULINARY DELICACIES
was lettered importantly across its wooden basket, which was filled with frosty glass pears and bananas contributed by a customer. Astride the bicycle stood a cardboard Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up—the prank of unknown persons, but no one had ever removed her and Marilyn rode on, her neck creased nearly to the breaking point, her smile growing paler season by season and her accordion-pleated skirt curling at the edges.

Hot, flushed workers darted around the kitchen, intent on their private tasks, weaving between the others like those Model T’s in silent comedies—
zip!
, just missing, never once colliding, their paths crisscrossing but miraculously slipping past disaster. Luke stood in the doorway unnoticed. His trip had been such a process in itself; he had almost lost sight of his purpose. What was he doing here, anyhow? But then he saw Ezra. Ezra was piling biscuits in a crude rush basket. He wore not the blue plaid shirt that Luke remembered—which was flannel, after all, unsuitable for summer—but a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He thoughtfully set each biscuit in its place, his large, blunt hands deliberate. Luke made his way across the kitchen. He was surprised by a flash of shyness. His heart was beating too fast. He arrived in front of Ezra and said, “Hi.”

Ezra looked up, still thoughtful. “Hi,” he said.

He didn’t know who this was.

Luke was stricken, at first. Then he began to feel pleased. Why, he must have changed immeasurably! He’d shot up a foot; his voice was getting croaky; he was practically a man. And there was some safety, a kind of shield, in Ezra’s flat gaze. Luke rearranged his plans. He squared his shoulders. “I’d like a job,” he said firmly.

Ezra grew still. “Luke?” he said.

“If that boy over there can tend the kettles—” Luke was saying. He stopped. “Pardon?”

“It’s Cody’s Luke. Isn’t it.”

“How’d you guess?”

“I could tell when you did your shoulders that way, just like your dad, just exactly like your dad. How funny! And something about the tone of your voice, all set to do battle … well, Luke!” He shook Luke’s hand very hard. His fingers had a sandy feel from the biscuits. “Where are your parents? Back at the house?”

“I’m here on my own.”

“On your own?” Ezra said. He was smiling genially, uncertainly, like someone hoping to understand a joke. “You mean, with nobody else?”

“I wanted to ask if I could stay with you.”

Ezra stopped smiling. “It’s Cody,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Something’s happened to him.”

“Nothing’s happened.”

“I should have gone down; I knew I should. I shouldn’t have let him stop me. The accident was worse than they let on.”

“No! He’s fine.”

Ezra surveyed him for a long, silent moment.

“He’s already got his walking cast,” Luke told him.

“Yes, but his other wounds, his head?”

“Everything’s okay.”

“You swear it?”

“Yes! Gosh.”

“See, I don’t have any other brothers,” Ezra said.

“I swear. I cross my heart,” said Luke.

“Then where is he?”

“He’s in Virginia,” said Luke. “I left him there. I ran away.”

Ezra thought this over. A waitress sidled past him with a tray of delicately clinking, trembling glasses.

“I didn’t plan to,” Luke told him. “But he said to me … see, he said …”

Oh, there was no point in telling Ezra what Cody had said.
It was nonsense, one of those remarks that pop up out of nowhere. And here was Luke, much too far from home, faltering under his uncle’s kindly gaze. “I can’t explain,” he said.

But just as if he
had
explained, Ezra said, gently, “You mustn’t take it to heart. He didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.”

“I know that,” Luke said.

On the telephone with Ruth, Ezra was jocular and brotherly, elaborately casual, playing down what had happened. “Now, Ruth, I’m sitting here looking straight at him and he’s perfectly all right … police? What for? Well, call them back, tell them he’s safe and sound. A lot of fuss over nothing, tell them.”

Luke listened, smiling anxiously as if his mother could see him. He laced the spirals of the telephone cord between his fingers. They were in Ezra’s little office behind the kitchen. Ezra sat at a desk piled with cookbooks, bills, magazines, a pot of chives, a copper pan with a cracked enamel lining, and a framed news photo of two men in aprons holding an entire long fish on a platter.

Then evidently, Cody took over the phone. Ezra sounded more serious now. “We could maybe keep him a while,” he said. “We’d like to have him visit. I hope you’ll let him.” In the directness and soberness of his tone, even in his short sentences, Luke read a kind of caution. He worried that Cody was shouting on the other end of the line; he dropped the cord and wandered away, pretending to be interested in the books in Ezra’s bookcase. He felt embarrassed for his father. But there must not have been any shouting after all; for Ezra said serenely, “All right, Cody. Yes, I can understand that.”

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
longing
to go to him, and of course he wouldn’t let me; he’s been like that ever since he was a baby, so … thorny, so bristly, just always has his back up. And now a little trouble or something—no, don’t look so uneasy! I won’t ask any questions, I promise; Ezra told me; it’s none of our business, but … a little trouble of some kind brings you here to us, I don’t know, maybe an argument? One of Cody’s tempers?”

“
Mother
,” said Ezra.

“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 …”