Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [137]
“He’s gone,” said Ezra.
They knew instantly whom he meant. Everyone looked toward Beck’s chair. It was empty. His napkin was tossed aside, one corner dipping into his plate and soaking up gravy.
“Wait here,” Ezra said.
They not only waited; they suspended talk, suspended movement, while Ezra rushed across the dining room and out the front door. There was a pause, during which even the baby said nothing. Then Ezra came back, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. “He’s nowhere in sight,” he said. “But it’s only been a minute. We can catch him! Come on, all of you.”
Still, no one moved.
“Please!” said Ezra. “Please. For once, I want this family to finish a meal together. Why, every dinner we’ve ever had, something has gone wrong. Someone has left in a huff, or in tears, everything’s fallen apart … Come on! Everybody out, cover the area, track him down! We could gather back here when we find him and take up where we left off.”
“Or,” Cody pointed out, “we could finish the meal without him. That’s always a possibility.”
But it wasn’t; even he could see that. One empty place at the table ruined everything. The chair itself, with its harp-shaped wooden back, had a desolate, reproachful look. Slowly, people rose. The children grouped around Ezra, who was issuing directives like a military strategist. “You and the little ones try Bushnell Street … rendezvous with Joe on Prima …” Then Ruth stood up too, to take the baby while Jenny put her coat on. They headed for the door. “Good hunting!” Cody called, and he tipped his chair back expansively and asked Mrs. Potter for another glass of wine.
Inwardly, though, he felt chastened. He thought of times in grade school when he’d teased some classmate to tears, taken things a little too far, and then looked around to find that all of his friends had stopped laughing. Wasn’t there the same hollow silence in this dining room, among these sheeted tables? Mrs. Potter replaced the wine bottle upon a silver-rimmed coaster. She stepped back and folded her hands across her stomach.
“I believe I’ll just go check on how they’re doing,” Cody told her.
Outside, the sky had deepened to a blue that was almost gaudy. A weak sun lit the tops of the buildings, and it didn’t seem so cold. Cody stood with his hands at his hips, his feet spread wide—unperturbed, to all appearances—and looked up and down the street. One section of the search party was just disappearing around a corner: Joe and the teen-agers. A stately black woman with her head wrapped in bandannas had stopped to redistribute the contents of two grocery bags.
Cody took the alley to the right of the doorway, a narrow strip of concrete lined with old packing crates and garbage cans battered shapeless. He passed the restaurant’s kitchen window, where an exhaust fan blew him a memory of Ezra’s lamb. He skirted a spindly, starved cat with a tail as matted as a worn-out bottlebrush. The back of his neck took on that special alertness required on Baltimore streets, but he walked at an easy, sauntering pace with his hands in his trouser pockets.
“Always have a purpose,” his father used to tell him. “Act like you’re heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.” He had also said, “Never trust a man who starts his sentences with ‘Frankly,’ ” and “Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,” and, “If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you’re speaking, not straight into his eyes.”
“All we have is each other,” Ezra would say, justifying one of his everlasting dinners. “We’ve got to stick together; nobody else has the same past that we have.” But in that meager handful of advice offered by Beck Tull—truly the sole advice Cody could remember from him—there didn’t seem much of a past to build on. From the sound of it, you would imagine that the three of them shared only a purposeful appearance, a mistrust of frankness, a deft wrist, and an evasive gaze.
Cody suddenly longed for his son—for Luke’s fair head and hunched shoulders. (He would rather