Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [112]
“Maybe she still likes you,” Luke said doubtfully.
“No,” said the woman. “She doesn’t.”
They passed a sign for Baltimore. The countryside seemed endlessly the same—fields of high grass, then the backsides of housing developments with clotheslines and motorcycles and aboveground, circular swimming pools, then fields of high grass again, as if the scenery came around regularly on a giant conveyor belt.
“What it is,” said the woman, “it’s like I’m driving till I find her past self. You know? And my past self. Then mile by mile, I simmer down. I let up on the gas a bit more. So by suppertime, I’m ready to come home again.”
Luke checked the clock on her dashboard. It was four thirty-five.
“Tonight I’ll just fix a tuna salad,” she said.
“Well, I appreciate your doing this.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, and she gave a final swipe to her nose.
By five o’clock, they had reached the outskirts of Baltimore. It was something like entering a piece of machinery, Luke thought—all sooty and cluttered and churning. The woman seemed used to it; she drove without comment. “Now, tell me what to do after Russell Street,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“How do I find your house?”
“Oh,” he said, “why don’t you just drop me off downtown.”
“Where downtown?”
“Anyplace will do.” She looked over at him.
He said, “I live so near, I mean …”
“Near to where?”
“Why, to anywhere.”
“Now, listen, Luke,” she said. “I’m getting a very odd feeling here. I want to know exactly where your parents are.”
He wondered what she would do if he told her he had to look them up in the telephone book. He’d been away so long, he would say, at summer camp or someplace, the address had just slipped his … no. But the fact was, he had never known Ezra’s street address. It was just a house they arrived at, Cody driving, Luke sitting in back.
“The thing of it is,” he said, “they’re both at work. They own this restaurant, the Homesick Restaurant. Maybe you could drop me off at the restaurant.”
“Where is that?”
“Ah …”
“There is no such place, is there,” she said. “I knew it! Homesick Restaurant, indeed.”
“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