Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [105]
All that afternoon he lay on his bed, rereading an old horse book from his childhood because he didn’t have anything else to do. The story struck him as foolish now, although once he’d loved it. When his mother called him for supper, he walked very firmly into the kitchen. He was going to refuse, absolutely, to eat in the bedroom with Cody any more. But his mother had already set two places at the kitchen table. She sat across from him while he ate, not eating much herself. Luke shoveled in various cold foods and refused to meet her eyes. The fact was that she was stupid. He didn’t know when he’d seen such a weak and stupid woman.
After supper he went back to his room and listened to a radio show where people called up a tired-sounding host and offered their opinions. They discussed drunken drivers and battered wives. It grew dark, but Luke didn’t turn on the light. His mother tapped hesitantly on his door, paused, and left.
Then he must have fallen asleep. When he woke it was darker than ever, and his neck was stiff, and a woman on the radio was saying, “Now, I’m not denying I signed the papers but that was only his fast talk, only him talking me into it. ‘Just put your John Doe right here,’ he tells me …”
“I assume you mean John Hancock,” the host said wearily.
“Whatever,” said the woman.
Then beneath these voices, murmuring through the wall, came Cody’s grumble and Ruth’s pale answers. Luke covered his head with his pillow.
He tried to recall his Uncle Ezra. It was several years since they’d met. And even that was such a brief visit, his father taking them away in a huff before they’d got well settled. Finding Ezra was something like hunting through that footlocker; he had to burrow past a dozen other memories, and more came trailing up along with what he was after. He smelled the burned toast in his grandma’s kitchen and remembered Ezra’s bedroom, which had once been Ezra’s and Cody’s together, where boyhood treasures (a football-shaped bookend, a peeling hockey stick) had sat in their places so long that to Ezra, they were invisible. Anything that caught Luke’s attention, Ezra had seemed surprised to see. “Oh! Would you like to have that?” he would ask, and when Luke politely declined, not wanting to seem greedy, Ezra said, “Please. I can’t think what it’s still doing here.” His room had been large—a sort of dormitory arrangement, occupying the whole third floor—but its stuffy smell of used sheets and twice-worn clothes had made it seem smaller. There was a lock inside the bathroom door downstairs, Luke recalled, that looked exactly like a little silver cashew; and the bathroom itself was tall and echoing, ancient, cold floored, with a porcelain knob in the tub reading WASTE.
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,