Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [0]
—Newsweek
“A joy to read … not just for entertainment, but for enlightenment, too.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Marvelous, astringent, hilarious, [and] strewn with the banana peels of love.”
—Cosmopolitan
“A deeply moving consideration of family relationships.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Tyler’s characters have character: quirks, odd angles of vision, colorful mean streaks, and harmonic longings.”
—Time
Also by Anne Tyler
IF MORNING EVER COMES
THE TIN CAN TREE
A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE
THE CLOCK WINDER
CELESTIAL NAVIGATION
SEARCHING FOR CALEB
EARTHLY POSSESSIONS
MORGAN’S PASSING
THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
BREATHING LESSONS
SAINT MAYBE
LADDER OF YEARS
A PATCHWORK PLANET
BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS
THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1982 by Anne Tyler Modarressi
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96729
eISBN: 978-0-307-78452-0
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
1
Something You Should Know
2
Teaching the Cat to Yawn
3
Destroyed by Love
4
Heart Rumors
5
The Country Cook
6
Beaches on the Moon
7
Dr. Tull is Not a Toy
8
This Really Happened
9
Apple Apple
10
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
1
Something You Should Know
While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her. It twitched her lips and rustled her breath, and she felt her son lean forward from where he kept watch by her bed. “Get …” she told him. “You should have got …”
You should have got an extra mother, was what she meant to say, the way we started extra children after the first child fell so ill. Cody, that was; the older boy. Not Ezra here beside her bed but Cody the troublemaker—a difficult baby, born late in her life. They had decided on no more. Then he developed croup. This was in 1931, when croup was something serious. She’d been frantic. Over his crib she had draped a flannel sheet, and she set out skillets, saucepans, buckets full of water that she’d heated on the stove. She lifted the flannel sheet to catch the steam. The baby’s breathing was choked and rough, like something pulled through tightly packed gravel. His skin was blazing and his hair was plastered stiffly to his temples. Toward morning, he slept. Pearl’s head sagged in the rocking chair and she slept too, fingers still gripping the ivory metal crib rail. Beck was away on business—came home when the worst was over, Cody toddling around again with nothing more than a runny nose and a loose, unalarming cough that Beck didn’t even notice. “I want more children,” Pearl told him. He acted surprised, though pleased. He reminded her that she hadn’t felt she could face another delivery. But “I want some extra,” she said, for it had struck her during the croup: if Cody died, what would she have left? This little rented house, fixed up so carefully and pathetically; the nursery with its Mother Goose theme; and Beck, of course, but he was so busy with the Tanner Corporation, away from home more often than not, and even when home always fuming over business: who was on the rise and who was on the skids, who had spread damaging rumors behind his back, what chance he had of being let go now that times were so hard.
“I don’t know why I thought just one little boy would suffice,” said Pearl.
But it wasn’t as simple as she had supposed. The second child was Ezra, so sweet and clumsy it could break your heart. She was more endangered than ever. It would have been best to stop at Cody. She still hadn’t learned, though. After Ezra came Jenny, the girl—such