Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [18]
“Just Ezra breaking another window,” Cody told her.
One weekend their father didn’t come home, and he didn’t come the next weekend either, or the next. Or rather, one morning Cody woke up and saw that it had been a while since their father was around. He couldn’t say that he had noticed from the start. His mother offered no excuses. Cody, watchful as a spy, studied her furrowed, distracted expression and the way that her hands plucked at each other. It troubled him to realize that he couldn’t picture his father’s most recent time with them. Trying to find some scene that would explain Beck’s leaving, he could only come up with general scenes, blended from a dozen repetitions: meals shattered by quarrels, other meals disrupted when Ezra spilled his milk, drives in the country where his father lost the way and his mother snapped out pained and exasperated directions. He thought of once when the Nash’s radiator had erupted in steam and his father, looking helpless, had flung his suit coat over it. “Oh, honestly,” his mother had said. But that was way back; it was years ago, wasn’t it? Cody journeyed through the various cubbies and crannies of the house, hunting up the trappings of his father’s “phases” (as his mother called them). There were the badminton racquets, the butterfly net, the archery set, the camera with its unwieldy flashgun, and the shoe box full of foreign stamps still in their glassine envelopes. But it meant nothing that these objects remained behind. What was alarming was his father’s half of the bureau: an empty sock drawer, an empty underwear drawer. In the shirt drawer, one unused sports shirt, purchased by the three children for Beck’s last birthday, his forty-fourth. And a full assortment of pajamas; but then, he always slept in his underwear. In the wardrobe, just a hanger strung with ties—his oldest, dullest, most frayed and spotted ties—and a pair of shoes so ancient that the toes curled up.
Cody’s brother and sister were staggeringly unobservant. They flitted in and out of the house like birds—Ezra playing his whistle, Jenny singing parts of jump-rope songs. Cody had the impression that musical notes filled their heads to overflowing; they left no room for anything serious. Auntie Sue got dressed in blue, Jenny sang, put on shoes and rubbers too … Her plain, flat voice and heedlessly swinging braids somehow reassured him. After all, what could go so wrong, when she skipped past with her ragged rope? What could go so very wrong?
Then one Saturday she said, “I’m worried about Daddy.”
“Why? “Cody asked.
“Cody,” she said, in her elderly way, “you can see that he doesn’t come home any more. I think he’s left us.”
“Don’t be silly,” Cody told her.
She surveyed him for a moment, with a composure that made him uneasy, and when he didn’t say any more she turned and went out on the porch. He heard the glider creak as she settled into it. But she didn’t start singing. In fact, the house was unusually quiet. The only sound was his mother’s heels, clicking back and forth overhead as she put