Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [106]
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 BALTIMORE. 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