Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [115]
She tried to pour a bowl of leftover green beans into a saucepan but missed, and slopped most of the liquid onto the counter, and swabbed it with wads of paper towels while laughing at herself. “What an old lady! What a silly old lady, you’re thinking. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. No, no, Ezra, I can manage, dear.”
“Mother, why don’t you let me take over?”
“I can certainly manage in my own kitchen, Ezra,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to go back to the restaurant? No telling what those people of yours are up to.”
“You just want to have Luke to yourself,” Ezra teased her.
“Oh, I admit it! I admit it!”
She turned on the flame beneath the saucepan. “Everything is coming together,” she told Luke. “I’ve been so worried, just sick with worry, picturing Cody in pain and longing to go to him, and of course he wouldn’t let me; he’s been like that ever since he was a baby, so … thorny, so bristly, just always has his back up. And now a little trouble or something—no, don’t look so uneasy! I won’t ask any questions, I promise; Ezra told me; it’s none of our business, but … a little trouble of some kind brings you here to us, I don’t know, maybe an argument? One of Cody’s tempers?”
“Mother,” said Ezra.
“And so,” she went on hastily, “we get to see him after all. He’s really going to show himself. But, Luke. Be truthful. He isn’t, he’s not … scarred or anything, is he? His face, I mean. He hasn’t got any disfiguring scars.”
“Just bruises,” said Luke. “Nothing that’ll last. In fact,” he added, “they’re mostly gone by now.”
It surprised him to find that he had held on to the picture of a broken Cody all this time, when really the bruises had faded, come to think of it, and the swellings had disappeared and the hair had almost completely grown over his head wound.
“He always was so handsome,” Pearl said. “It was part of his identity.”
Ezra moved around the table, setting out plates and silverware. The saucepan hissed on the stove. Luke sat down on a kitchen chair and tipped back against a radiator. Its sharply sculptured ribs and tall pipes made him think of old-fashioned, comforting places—a church he’d visited with a kindergarten friend, for instance, or his second-grade classroom, where once, when a snowstorm started during lunch hour, he had imagined a blizzard developing and keeping all the children snugly marooned for days, drinking cups of soup sent up from the cafeteria.
After supper, he and Pearl watched TV while Ezra went back to check the restaurant. Pearl kept the living room completely dark, lit only by the flickering blue TV screen. Both the front windows were open and they could hear the noises from the street—a game of prisoner’s base, a Good Humor bell, a woman calling her children. Around nine o’clock, when the twilight had finally given way to night and the stuffy air had cooled some, Luke caught the distinctive, tightly woven hum of a Mercedes drawing up to the curb. He tensed. Pearl, who wouldn’t have recognized the sound, went on placidly watching TV. “Who’s that, dear?” she asked him, but it was some actor she referred to; she was peering at the television set. There were footsteps across the porch. “Eh?” she said. “Already?” She rose, fumbling first for the arms of her chair in two or three blind passes. She opened the front door and said, “Cody?”
Cody stood looming, larger than Luke had expected, his arm and leg casts glowing whitely in the dark. “Hello, Mother,” he said.
“Why, Cody, let me look at you! And Ruth: hello, dear. Cody, are you all right? I can’t make out your face. Are you really feeling better?”
“I’m fine,” Cody told her. He kissed her cheek and then limped in.
“Hey, Dad,” Luke said, rising awkwardly.
Cody said, “May I ask what you thought you were up to?”