Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [116]
“Well, I don’t know …”
“Don’t know! Is that all you have to say? You scared the hell out of us! Your mother’s been beside herself.”
“Oh, honey, we were so worried!” Ruth cried. She pulled him close and kissed him. Her dress—a magenta polyester that she wore on special occasions—crumpled its sharp ruffles against his chest. He smelled her familiar, grassy smell that he’d never really noticed before.
“We near about lost our minds,” Ruth told Pearl. “I believe I must’ve aged a quarter-century. I felt if I looked out that same front window one more time I’d go mad, go stark, raving mad—same old curve in the road, same old sidewalk, empty. You just don’t know.”
“I do know. I do know,” said Pearl.
She was feeling for the switch to a lamp that sat on a table. The silk shade rustled and tilted. Then Ezra arrived in the door. “Cody?” he said. “Is that you?” He strode in fast and first encountered Ruth—almost ran her down—and seized her hand and pumped it. “Good to see you, Ruth,” he said. Meanwhile, Cody found the switch for his mother and turned the lamp on. It was coincidental; he was only being helpful, but Luke felt he’d turned on the lamp to examine them: Ruth and Ezra, face to face. Ezra blinked in the sudden light and then gave Cody a bear hug. Cody stood unresisting. “How’s your arm? How’s your leg?” Ezra asked. “What, no crutches?”
Cody went on studying Ruth and Ezra. “He says he can’t use them,” said Ruth. “He says with his opposite arm in a cast …” She reached out and smoothed Luke’s T-shirt, which didn’t need smoothing. She pushed his hair off his forehead. “And now that he’s got this walking cast …” she said absently. “Oh, Luke, sweetheart, didn’t you think you’d be missed?”
Cody turned away and sank into an armchair. “Would you two like some iced tea?” Pearl asked.
“No, thanks,” said Cody.
“Or coffee? A nice cup of coffee?”
“No! God. Nothing,” said Cody.
Luke expected Pearl to look hurt, but she only gave Cody a curiously satisfied smile. “You always were a grump when you weren’t feeling well,” she told him.
In fact, how surprising this whole visit was!—low-keyed and uneventful, even boring. Luke started out sitting rigidly erect, but gradually he relaxed and let his attention drift to a variety show on TV. The grown-ups murmured around him without any emphasis, discussing money. Cody wanted Pearl to get a new furnace; he would pay for it, he said. Pearl said she had a little savings, but Cody kept insisting, as if there were something gratifying, something triumphant in buying a person a furnace. Oh, money, money, money. You’d think they could come up with some more interesting subject.
Luke pressed a lever in his armchair and found himself flung back, his feet raised suddenly on some sort of footrest. Now Pearl was asking where they would go after Petersburg, and Cody was saying he didn’t know; Sloan and he were hoping to take on this cosmetics firm down in … His reasonable tone of voice made Luke feel hoodwinked, betrayed. Why, all this time he’d been hearing such terrible tales! He’d been told of such ill will and bitterness! But Cody and Pearl conversed pleasantly, like any civilized adults. They discussed whether the North or the South was a better place to live. They had a mild, dull, uninvested sort of argument about it, till it emerged that Pearl was assuming Baltimore was North and Cody was assuming it was South. She asked if this new factory might be as dangerous as the last one. “Any place is dangerous,” said Cody, “if idiots are running it.”
“Cody, I worry so,” she told him. “If you knew how frantic I’ve been! Hearing my oldest, my firstborn son is in critical condition and I’m not allowed to come see him.”
“Critical condition! I’m walking around, aren’t I?”
“The walking wounded,” she said, and she threw her hands up. “Isn’t it ironic? I’d always thought disasters were … lower class. I would read these hard-luck stories in the paper: lady evicted when she’s trying to raise the seven children of her daughter who was shot to death in a bar, and one of the children’s retarded and another