Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [103]
It was the nature of Cody’s job that he worked alone. As soon as he finished streamlining whatever factory had called him in, he moved on. His partner, a man named Sloan, lived in New York City and invented the devices that Cody determined a need for—sorting racks, folding aids, single hand tools combining the tasks of several. Consequently, there were no fellow workers to pay Cody visits, unless you counted that one edgy call by the owner of the factory where he’d had his accident. And they didn’t know any of the neighbors. They were on their own, just the three of them. They might have been castaways. No wonder Cody acted so irritable. The only time Luke and his mother got out was once a week, when they went for groceries. Backing her white Mercedes from the garage, Ruth sat erect and alert, not looking behind her, already anxious about Cody. “Maybe I should’ve made you stay. If he needs to go to the bathroom—”
“He can good and wait,” Luke said through his teeth.
“Why, Luke!”
“Let him pee in the bed.”
“Luke Tull!”
Luke stared out the window.
“It’s been hard on you,” his mother said. “We’ve got to find you some friends.”
“I don’t need friends.”
“Everybody needs friends. We don’t have a one, in this town. I feel like I’m drying up. Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “if this life is really …” But she didn’t say any more.
When they returned, Cody was pleasant and cheerful, as if he’d made some resolutions in their absence. Or maybe he’d been refreshed by the solitude. “Talked to Sloan,” he told Ruth. “He called from New York. I said to him, soon as I get this cast off I’m going to finish up at the factory and clear on out. I can’t take much more of this place.”
“Oh, good, Cody, honey.”
“Bring me my briefcase, will you? I want to jot down some ideas. There’s lots I could be doing in bed.”
“I picked out some of those pears you like.”
“No, no, just my briefcase, and that pen on the desk in my study. I’m going to see if my fingers are up to writing yet.”
He told Luke, “Work is what I need. I’ve been starved for work. It’s made me a little snappish.”
Luke scratched his rib cage. He said, “That’s all right.”
“You make sure you get a job you enjoy, once you’re grown. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. That’s important.”
“I know.”
“Me, I deal with time,” said Cody. He accepted a ball-point pen from Ruth. “Time is my favorite thing of all.”
Luke loved it when his father talked about time.
“Time is my obsession: not to waste it, not to lose it. It’s like … I don’t know, an object, to me; something you can almost take hold of. If I could just collect enough of it in one clump, I always think. If I could pass it back and forth and sideways, you know? If only Einstein were right and time were a kind of river you could choose to step into at any place along the shore.”
He clicked his pen point in and out, frowning into space. “If they had a time machine, I’d go on it,” he said. “It wouldn’t much matter to me where. Past or future: just out of my time. Just someplace else.”
Luke felt a pang. “But then you wouldn’t know me,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Sure he would,” Ruth said briskly. She was opening the latches of Cody’s briefcase. “He’d take you with him. Only mind,” she told Cody, “if Luke goes too you’ve got to bring penicillin, and his hay fever pills, and his fluoride toothpaste, you hear?”
Cody laughed, but he didn’t say one way or another about taking Luke along.
That was the evening that Cody first got his strange notion. It came about so suddenly: they were playing Monopoly on Cody’s bed, the three of them, and Cody was winning as usual and offering Luke a loan to keep going. “Oh, well, no, I guess I’ve lost,” said Luke.
There was the briefest pause—a skipped beat. Cody looked over at Ruth, who was counting her deed cards. “He sounds just like Ezra,” he told her.
She frowned at Baltic Avenue.
“Didn’t you hear what he said? He said it just like Ezra.