Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [114]
“No! He’s fine.”
Ezra surveyed him for a long, silent moment.
“He’s already got his walking cast,” Luke told him.
“Yes, but his other wounds, his head?”
“Everything’s okay.”
“You swear it?”
“Yes! Gosh.”
“See, I don’t have any other brothers,” Ezra said.
“I swear. I cross my heart,” said Luke.
“Then where is he?”
“He’s in Virginia,” said Luke. “I left him there. I ran away.”
Ezra thought this over. A waitress sidled past him with a tray of delicately clinking, trembling glasses.
“I didn’t plan to,” Luke told him. “But he said to me … see, he said …”
Oh, there was no point in telling Ezra what Cody had said. It was nonsense, one of those remarks that pop up out of nowhere. And here was Luke, much too far from home, faltering under his uncle’s kindly gaze. “I can’t explain,” he said.
But just as if he had explained, Ezra said, gently, “You mustn’t take it to heart. He didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.”
“I know that,” Luke said.
On the telephone with Ruth, Ezra was jocular and brotherly, elaborately casual, playing down what had happened. “Now, Ruth, I’m sitting here looking straight at him and he’s perfectly all right … police? What for? Well, call them back, tell them he’s safe and sound. A lot of fuss over nothing, tell them.”
Luke listened, smiling anxiously as if his mother could see him. He laced the spirals of the telephone cord between his fingers. They were in Ezra’s little office behind the kitchen. Ezra sat at a desk piled with cookbooks, bills, magazines, a pot of chives, a copper pan with a cracked enamel lining, and a framed news photo of two men in aprons holding an entire long fish on a platter.
Then evidently, Cody took over the phone. Ezra sounded more serious now. “We could maybe keep him a while,” he said. “We’d like to have him visit. I hope you’ll let him.” In the directness and soberness of his tone, even in his short sentences, Luke read a kind of caution. He worried that Cody was shouting on the other end of the line; he dropped the cord and wandered away, pretending to be interested in the books in Ezra’s bookcase. He felt embarrassed for his father. But there must not have been any shouting after all; for Ezra said serenely, “All right, Cody. Yes, I can understand that.”
When he’d hung up, he told Luke, “They’ll be here as soon as possible. He’d rather come get you now, he said.”
Luke felt a little notch of dread beginning in his stomach. He wondered how angry his father was. He wondered how he could have thought of doing this—coming all this distance! So alone! It seemed like something he had floated through in a dream.
His grandmother’s house still had its burned-toast smell, its dusky corners, its atmosphere of secrecy. If you moved in here, Luke thought, wouldn’t you go on finding unexpected cubbyholes and closets for weeks or even months afterward? (Yes, imagine moving in. Imagine sharing the cozy living room, Grandma’s peaceful kitchen.) His grandmother skittered around him, adding tiny dishes of food to what was already on the table. Ezra kept telling her, “Mother, take it easy. Don’t fuss so.” But Luke enjoyed the fuss. He liked the way she would stop in the midst of preparing something to come running over and cup his face. “Look at you! Just look!” She was shorter than he was, now. And she had aged a great deal, or else he’d been too young before to notice. There was something scratchy and flyaway about her little screwed-tight topknot, once blond but now colorless, and her face sectioned deeply by pockets of lines and her wrinkled, spotted hands. He saw how much she loved him, purely from her hungry touch on his cheeks, and he wondered how his father could have misjudged her so.
“It’s not right that your parents just come and take you back,” she told him. “We’ll make them stay. We’ll just make them. I’ll change the sheets in Jenny’s old room. You can have the guest room. Oh, Luke! I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was you if I’d seen you on the street; it’s been that long. Though