Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [28]
“I’m serious,” she was saying. “I don’t want to get her anything warm. Anything necessary. Anything—”
“Serviceable,” Ezra said.
They all grimaced.
“If we bought her a ring, though,” Ezra said, “she might feel bad about the wastefulness. She might not really enjoy it.”
Cody hated the radiant, grave expression that Ezra wore sometimes; it showed that he realized full well how considerate he was being. “What do you want for Christmas?” Cody asked him roughly. “World peace?”
“World what? I’d like a recorder,” Ezra said.
They crossed an intersection with a swarm of sailors. “Well,” said Cody, “you’re not getting one.”
“I know that.”
“You’re getting a cap with turn-down earflaps and a pair of corduroy pants.”
“Cody!” said Jenny. “You weren’t supposed to tell.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ezra said.
They separated for a woman who had stopped to fit her child’s mittens on. “It used to be,” Jenny said, “that we got toys for Christmas, and candy. Remember how nice last Christmas was?”
“This one’s going to be nice too,” Ezra told her.
“Remember down in Virginia, when Daddy bought us a sled, and Mother said it was silly because it hardly ever snowed but December twenty-sixth we woke up and there was snow all over everything?”
“That was fun,” Ezra said.
“We had the only sled in town,” Jenny said. “Cody started charging for rides. Daddy showed us how to wax the runners and we pulled it to the top of that hill … What was the name of that hill? It had such a funny—”
Then she stopped short on the sidewalk. Pedestrians jostled all around her. “Why,” she said.
Cody and Ezra looked at her.
“He’s really not ever coming home again. Is he,” she said.
No one answered. After a minute they resumed walking, three abreast, and Cody took a pinch of Ezra’s sleeve, too, so they wouldn’t drift apart in the crowd.
Cody sorted the mail, setting aside for his mother a couple of envelopes that looked like Christmas cards. He threw away a department store flyer and a letter from his school. He pocketed an envelope with a Cleveland postmark.
He went upstairs to his room and switched on the goose-necked lamp beside his bed. While the lightbulb warmed, he whistled and stared out the window. Then he tested the bulb with his fingers and, finding it hot enough, wrapped the envelope around it and counted slowly to thirty. After that he pried open the flap with ease and pulled out a single sheet of paper and a check.
… says they should be producing to capacity by June of ’45 … his father wrote. Sorry the enclosed is a little smaller than expected as I have incurred some … It was his usual letter, nothing different. Cody folded it again and slid it back in the envelope, though it hardly seemed worth the effort. Then he heard the front door slam. “Ezra Tull?” Pearl called. Her cloppy high heels started rapidly up the stairs. Cody tucked the envelope into his bureau and shut the drawer. “Ezra!”
“He’s not here,” Cody said.
She came to stand in the doorway. “Where is he?” she asked. She was out of breath, untidy-looking. Her hat was on crooked and she still wore her coat.
“He went to get the laundry, like you told him to.”
“What do you know about this?”
She bore down on him, holding out a stack of snapshots. The one on top was so blurred and gray that Cody had trouble deciphering it. He took the whole collection from her hand. Ah, yes: Ezra