Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [34]
He handed the letter back to her. She had no way of knowing what he had got out of it. “If they’d let me,” he said, “I’d have gone with him. Oh, I wouldn’t mind going. But they claimed I was too tall.”
“Too tall?”
She’d never heard of such a thing.
“So I had to stay behind,” he said, “but I didn’t want to. I don’t want to work in a body shop all my life; I plan to do something different.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Find something with Ezra, I guess, once he gets out of the army. Ezra, he would always come to visit me here and look around and say, ‘How can you stand it? All the noise,’ he’d say. ‘We got to find you something different.’ But I didn’t know where to start hunting, and now Ezra’s gone away. It’s not the noise that’s so bad, but it’s hot in summer and cold in winter. My feet get bothered by the cold, get these itchy things all over the toes.”
“Chilblains, maybe,” Jenny suggested. She felt pleasantly bored; it seemed she had known Josiah forever. She ran a thumbnail down the crease of Ezra’s letter. Josiah gazed either at her or straight through her (it was hard to tell which) and cracked his knuckles.
“Probably what I’ll do is work for Ezra,” he said, “once Ezra opens his restaurant.”
“What are you talking about? Ezra’s not opening a restaurant.”
“Sure he is.”
“Why would he want to do that? As soon as he pulls himself together he’s going off to college, studying to be a teacher.”
“Who says so?” Josiah asked.
“Well, my mother does. He’s got the patience for it, she says. Maybe he’ll be a professor, even,” Jenny told him. But she wasn’t so certain now. “I mean, it’s not a lifework, restaurants.”
“Why isn’t it?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Ezra’s going to have him a place where people come just like to a family dinner,” Josiah said. “He’ll cook them one thing special each day and dish it out on their plates and everything will be solid and wholesome, really homelike.”
“Ezra told you that?”
“Really just like home.”
“Well, I don’t know, maybe people go to restaurants to get away from home.”
“It’s going to be famous,” Josiah said.
“You have the wrong idea entirely,” Jenny told him. “How did you come up with such a crazy notion?”
Then without warning, Josiah went back to being his old self—or her old picture of him. He dropped his head, like a marionette whose strings had snapped. “I got to go,” he told her.
“Josiah?”
“Don’t want those people yelling at me.”
He loped away without saying goodbye. Jenny watched after him as regretfully as if he were Ezra himself. He didn’t look back.
Cody wrote that he was being interviewed by several corporations. He wanted a job in business after he finished school. Ezra wrote that he could march twenty miles at a go now without much tiring. It began to seem less incongruous, even perfectly natural, that Ezra should be a soldier. After all, wasn’t he an enduring sort, uncomplaining, cheerful in performing his duties? Jenny had worried needlessly. Her mother too seemed to relax somewhat. “Really it’s for the best, when you think about it,” she said. “A stint in the service is often just the ticket; gives a boy time to get hold of himself. I bet when he comes back, he’ll want to go to college. I bet he’ll want to teach someplace.”
Jenny didn’t tell her about his restaurant.
Twice, after her first visit to Josiah, she looked in on him again. She would stop by the body shop after school, and Josiah would come outside a moment to swing his arms and gaze beyond her and speak of Ezra. “Got a letter from him myself, over at the house. Claimed he was marching a lot.”
“Twenty miles,” Jenny said.
“Some of it uphill.”
“He must be in pretty good shape by now.”
“He always did like to walk.”
The third time she came, it was almost dark. She’d stayed late for chorus. Josiah was just leaving work. He was getting into his jacket, which was made of a large, shaggy plaid in muted shades of navy and