Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [131]
“It’s like this,” he said finally.
He coughed.
“I was kind of expecting Dad,” he said.
There was a blank, flat pause.
“Who?” Cody asked.
“Our father.”
“But how would he know?”
“Well, ah, I invited him.”
“Ezra, for God’s sake,” Cody said.
“It wasn’t my idea,” Ezra said. “It was Mother’s. She talked about it when she got so sick. She said, ‘Look in my address book. Ask everybody in it to my funeral.’ I wondered who she meant, at first. You know she never wrote anyone, and most of her relatives are dead. But as soon as I opened the address book I saw it: Beck Tull. I didn’t even realize she knew where he had run off to.”
“He wrote her; that’s how she knew,” Cody said.
“He did?”
“From time to time he sent these letters, boasting, bragging. Doing fine … expecting a raise … I peeked inside when Mother wasn’t looking.”
“I never even guessed,” said Ezra.
“What difference would it have made?”
“Oh, I don’t know …”
“He ditched us,” Cody said, “when we were kids. What do you care about him now?”
“Well, I don’t,” said Ezra. And Cody, who had so often been exasperated by Ezra’s soft heart, saw that in this case, it was true: he really didn’t care. He looked directly at Cody with his peculiarly clear, light-filled eyes, and he said, “It was Mother who asked; not me. All I did was call him up and say, ‘This is Ezra. Mother has died and we’re holding her funeral Monday at eleven.’ ”
“That was all?” Cody said.
“Well, and then I told him he could stop by the house first, if he got here early.”
“But you didn’t ask, ‘How are you?’ or ‘Where’ve you been?’ or ‘Why’d you go?’ ”
“I just said, ‘This is Ezra. Mother has died and—’ ”
Cody laughed.
“At any rate,” Jenny said, “it doesn’t seem he’s coming.”
“No,” said Cody, “but think about it. I mean, don’t you get it? First he leaves and Mother pretends he hasn’t. Out of pride, or spite, or something, she never says a word about it, makes believe to all of us that he’s only on a business trip. A thirty-five-year business trip. Then Ezra calls him on the phone and does the very same thing. ‘This is Ezra,’ he says, as if he’d seen Dad just yesterday—”
Jenny said, “Can we get started now? My children will be freezing to death.”
“Oh, surely,” Ruth told her. “Cody, honey, her children are waiting on us.”
“Mother would have done that, just exactly,” Cody said. “If Dad had walked in she would have said, ‘Ah, yes, there you are. Can you tell me if my slip is showing?’ ”
Joe gave a little bark of laughter. Ezra smiled, but his eyes filmed over with tears. “That’s true,” he said. “She would have. You know? She really would have.”
“Fine, then, she would have,” Jenny said. “Shall we go?”
She had been so young when their father left, anyhow. She claimed to have forgotten all about him.
At the funeral, the minister, who had never met their mother, delivered a eulogy so vague, so general, so universally applicable that Cody thought of that parlor game where people fill in words at random and then giggle hysterically at the story that results. Pearl Tull, the minister said, was a devoted wife and a loving mother and a pillar of the community. She had lived a long, full life and died in the bosom of her family, who grieved for her but took comfort in knowing that she’d gone to a far finer place.
It slipped the minister’s mind, or perhaps he hadn’t heard, that she hadn’t been anyone’s wife for over a third of a century; that she’d been a frantic, angry, sometimes terrifying mother; and that she’d never shown the faintest interest in her community but dwelt in it like a visitor from a superior neighborhood, always wearing her hat when out walking, keeping her doors tightly shut when at home. That her life had been very long indeed but never full; stunted was more like it. Or crabbed. Or … what was the word Cody wanted? Espaliered. Twisted and flattened to the wall—all the more so as she’d aged and wizened, lost her sight, and grown to lean too heavily on Ezra. That she was not at all religious, hadn’t set foot in this church for decades; and though in certain wistful