Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [118]
“Isn’t it funny,” Luke told his father, “no one’s ever asked you to reorganize anything in Baltimore.”
“Very funny,” Cody said.
“We could live with Grandma then, couldn’t we?”
Cody said nothing.
They left the city for the expressway, entering a world of high, cold lights and a blue-black sky. Ruth slid slowly against the window. Her small head bobbed with every dip in the road.
“Mom’s asleep,” Luke said.
“She’s tired,” said Cody.
Perhaps he meant it as a reproach. Was this where the scolding started? Luke kept very quiet for a while. But what Cody said next was, “It wears her out, that house. Your grandma’s so difficult to deal with.”
“Grandma’s not difficult.”
“Not for you, maybe. For other people she is. For your mother. Grandma believes your mother is ‘scrappy.’ She told me that, once. Called her ‘scrappy and hoydenish.’ ” He laughed, recalling something, so that Luke started smiling expectantly. “One time,” Cody said, “—I bet you don’t remember this—your mother and I had this silly little spat and she packed you up and ran off to Ezra. Then as soon as she got to the station, she started thinking what life would be like with your grandma and she called and asked me to come drive her home.”
Luke’s smile faded. “Ran off to where?” he asked.
“To Ezra. But never mind, it was only one of those—”
“She didn’t run to Ezra. She was planning to go to her folks,” Luke said.
“What folks?” Cody asked him.
Luke didn’t know.
“She’s an orphan,” Cody said. “What folks?”
“Well, maybe—”
“She was planning to go to Ezra,” Cody said. “I can see it now! I can picture how they’d take up their marriage, right where ours left off. Oh, I believe I’ve always had the feeling it wasn’t my marriage, anyhow. It was someone else’s. It was theirs. Sometimes I seemed to enjoy it better when I imagined I was seeing it through someone else’s eyes.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Luke asked him.
“All I meant was—”
“What are you, crazy? How come you go on hanging on to these things, year after year after year?”
“Now, wait a minute, now …”
“Mom?” Luke shook her shoulder. “Mom! Wake up!”
Ruth’s head sagged over to the other side.
“Let her rest,” Cody said. “Goddammit, Luke—”
“Wake up, Mom!”
“Hmm,” said Ruth, not waking.
“Mom? I want to ask you. Mom? Remember when you packed me up and left Dad?”
“Mm.”
“Remember?”
“Yes,” she murmured, curling tighter.
“Where were we going to go, Mom?”
She raised her head, with her hair all frowsy, and gave him a blurry, dazed stare. “What?” she said. “Garrett County, where my uncle lives. Who wants to know?”
“Nobody. Go back to sleep,” Cody told her.
She went back to sleep. Cody rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
They sped through a corridor of light that was bounded on both sides by the deepest darkness. They met and passed solitary cars that disappeared in an instant. Luke’s eyelids drooped.
“What I mean to say,” Cody said. “What I drove all this way to say …”
But then he trailed off. And when he started speaking again, it was on a whole different subject: time. How time was underestimated. How time was so important and all. Luke felt relieved. He listened comfortably, lulled by his father’s words. “Everything,” his father said, “comes down to time in the end—to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? Even big things—even mourning a death: aren’t you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos—ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced … Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful?