Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [27]
And his father: he had uprooted the family continually, tearing them away as soon as they were settled and plunking them someplace new. But where was he now that Cody wanted to be uprooted, now that he was saddled with a reputation and desperate to leave and start over? His father had ruined their lives, Cody thought—first in one way and then in another. He thought of tracking him down and arriving on his doorstep: “I’m in trouble; it’s all your fault. I’ve got a bad name, I need to leave town, you’ll have to take me in.” But that would only be another unknown city, another new school to walk into alone. And there too, probably, his grades would begin to slip and the neighbors would complain and the teachers would start to suspect him first when any little thing went wrong; and then Ezra would follow shortly in his dogged, earnest, devoted way and everybody would say to Cody, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
He let himself into the house, which smelled of last night’s cabbage. It was almost dark and the air seemed thick; he felt he had to labor to move through it. He climbed the stairs wearily. He passed Jenny’s room, where she sat doing her homework in a tiny dull circle of yellow from the lamp. Her face was thin and shadowed and she didn’t bother greeting him. He climbed on up to his own room and flicked on the light switch. He had set his books on the bureau before he realized Ezra was there. Asleep, as usual—curled on his bed with a sheaf of homework papers. Oh, Ezra was so slow and dazed; he could sleep anytime. His lips were parted. His cat, Alicia, lay in the crook of his arm, purring and looking self-satisfied.
Cody knelt beside his bed and pulled from beneath it a half-filled bottle of bourbon, an empty gin bottle, five empty beer bottles, a crumpled pack of Camels, and a box of pretzels. He strewed them around Ezra, arranging them just right. He went to the hall storage closet and took out his father’s Six-20 Brownie camera. In the doorway of his room, he aimed and paused and clicked the shutter. Ezra didn’t wake, amazingly enough. (The light from the flashgun was so powerful, you’d see swimming blue globes for minutes after being photographed.) But the cat seemed mildly disturbed. She got to her feet and yawned. What a yawn!—huge and disdainful. It would have made a wonderful picture: deadbeat Ezra and his no-account cat, both with gaping mouths. Cody wondered if she’d do it again. “Yawn,” he told her, and he advanced the film for another photo. “Alicia? Yawn.” She only smirked and settled down again. He yawned himself, demonstrating, but apparently cats didn’t find such things contagious. He lowered the camera and came closer to pat her head, scratch beneath her chin, stroke her throat. Nothing worked. “Yawn, dammit,” he said, and he tried to pry her teeth apart by force. She drew up sharply, eyes wide and glaring. Ezra woke.
“Your cat is retarded,” Cody told him.
“Huh?”
“I can’t get her to yawn.”
Ezra reached over, matter-of-factly, and circled the cat with his arm. She gave a luxurious yawn and nestled down against him, and Ezra went back to sleep. Cody didn’t try for another picture, though. He’d never seen anyone take the fun out of things the way Ezra could.
Cody and Ezra and Jenny went shopping for a Christmas present for their mother. Each of them had saved four weeks’ allowance, which meant forty cents apiece, and Cody had a dollar extra that he’d taken from Miss Saunders’s center desk drawer. That made two dollars and twenty cents—enough for some winter gloves, Cody suggested. Jenny said gloves were boring and she wanted to buy a diamond ring. “That’s really stupid,” Cody told her. “Even you ought to know you can’t buy a diamond ring for two-twenty.”
“I don’t mean a real one, I mean glass. Or anything, just so it’s pretty and not useful.”
They were forced to shop in the stores near home, since they didn’t want to spend money on carfare. It was mid-December and crowds of other people were shopping too—plowing