Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [30]
She was about to be, for the very first time, the only child at home. Her brother Cody was away at college. Her brother Ezra had refused to go to college and started instead what his mother openly hoped was a temporary job in Scarlatti’s Restaurant, chopping vegetables for salads; but just as he was advancing to sauces, notice came that he’d been drafted. None of his family could envision it: placid Ezra slogging through Korea, tripping over his bayonet at every opportunity. Surely something would be wrong with him, some weakness of spine or eyesight that would save him. But no, he was found to be in perfect health, and in February was ordered off to a training camp down south. Jenny sat on his bed while he packed. She was touched by the fact that he was taking along his little pearwood recorder, the one he’d bought with his first week’s wages. It didn’t seem to her that he had a very clear idea of what he was getting into. He moved in his cautious, deliberate way, sorting out what he would send to the basement for storage. Since their mother had plans for renting his room, he couldn’t just leave things as they were. Already his brother Cody’s bed was freshly made up for a boarder, the blankets tight as drumskins on the narrow mattress, and Cody’s sports equipment was packed away in cartons.
She watched Ezra empty a drawer of undershirts, most of them full of holes. (Somehow, he always managed to look like an orphan.) He had grown to be a large-boned man, but his face was still childishly rounded, with the wide eyes, the downy cheeks, the delicate lips of a schoolboy. His hair seemed formed of layers of silk in various shades of yellow and beige. Girls were always after him, Jenny knew, but he was too shy to take advantage of it—or maybe even to be aware of it. He proceeded through life absentmindedly, meditatively, as if considering some complex mathematical puzzle from which he was bound to look up, you would think, as soon as he found the solution. But he never did.
“After I leave,” he told Jenny, “will you stop in at Scarlatti’s Restaurant from time to time?”
“Stop in and do what?”
“Well, talk with Mrs. Scarlatti, I mean. Just make sure she’s all right.”
Mrs. Scarlatti had been without a husband for years, if she’d ever had one, and her only son had recently been killed in action. Jenny knew she must be lonely. But she was a bleak and striking woman, so fashionably dressed that it seemed an insult to her particular section of Baltimore. Jenny couldn’t imagine holding a conversation with her. Still, anything for Ezra. She nodded.
“And Josiah too,” Ezra said.
“Josiah!”
Josiah was even more difficult—downright terrifying, in fact: Ezra’s friend Josiah Payson, close to seven feet tall, excitable, and incoherent. It was generally understood that he wasn’t quite right in the head. Back in grade school, the other children had teased him, and they had teased Ezra too and asked Jenny why her brother hung out with dummies. “Everybody knows Josiah should be sent away,” they told her. “He ought to go to the crazy house; everybody says so.”
She said, “Ezra, I can’t talk to Josiah. I wouldn’t understand him.”
“Of course you’d understand,” said Ezra. “He speaks English, doesn’t he?”
“He jibbers, he jabbers, he stutters!”
“You must