Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [35]
She dropped back, deciding that he’d rather be alone, but partway down the block he stopped and turned and waited. “Aren’t I a human being?” he asked when she arrived at his side. “Don’t I feel bad if someone shouts at me? I wish I were out in the woods someplace, none of these people to bother me. Camping out in a dead, dead quiet with a little private tent from L. L. Bean and a L. L. Bean sleeping bag.” He turned and rushed on; Jenny had to run. “I’ve half a mind to give notice,” he said.
“Why don’t you, then?”
“My mama needs the money.”
“You could find something else.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t easy.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer. They raced past a discount jewelry store, a bakery, a bank of private apartments with inviting yellow windows. Then he said, “Come and have supper at our house.”
“What? Oh, I can’t.”
“Ezra used to come,” he said, “back before he worked in the restaurant and couldn’t get away. My mama was always glad to set an extra plate out, always, anytime. But your mother didn’t often let him; your mother doesn’t like me.”
“Oh, well …”
“I wish you’d just have supper with us.”
She paused. Then she said, “I’d be happy to.”
He didn’t seem surprised. (Jenny was astonished, herself.) He grunted and continued to tear along. His whisks of black hair stood out around his head. He led her down a side street, then through an alley that Jenny wasn’t familiar with.
From the front, his house must have been very much like hers—a brick row house set in a tiny yard. But they approached it from the rear, where a tacked-on, gray frame addition gave it a ramshackle look. The addition turned out to be an unheated pantry with a cracked linoleum floor. Josiah stopped there to work himself free of his jacket, and then he reached for Jenny’s coat and hung them both on hooks beside the door. “Mama?” he called. He showed Jenny into the kitchen. “Got company for supper, Mama.”
Mrs. Payson stood at the stove—a small, chubby woman dressed in earth tones. She reminded Jenny of some modest brown bird. Her face was round and smooth and shining. She looked up and smiled, and since Josiah failed to make the introduction Jenny said, “I’m Jenny Tull.”
“Oh, any kin to Ezra?”
“I’m his sister.”
“My, I’m just so fond of that boy,” Mrs. Payson said. She lifted the pot from the stove and set it on the table. “When he was called up I cried, did Josiah tell you? I sat right down and cried. Why, he has been like a son to me, always in and out of the house …” She laid three place settings while Josiah poured the milk. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “back when Josiah’s daddy died, Ezra came and sat with us, and fixed us meals, and made us cocoa. I said, ‘Ezra, I feel selfish, taking you from your family,’ but he said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Payson.’ ”
Jenny wondered when that could have been. Ezra had never mentioned Mr. Payson’s dying.
Supper was spaghetti and a salad, with chocolate cake for dessert. Jenny ate sparingly, planning to eat again when she got home so her mother wouldn’t guess; but Josiah had several helpings of everything. Mrs. Payson kept refilling his plate. “To look at him,” she said, “you’d never know he eats so much, would you? Skinny as a fence post. I reckon he’s still a growing boy.” She laughed, and Josiah grinned bashfully with his eyes cast down—a skeletal, stooped, hunkering man. Jenny had never thought about the fact that Josiah was somebody’s son, some woman’s greatest treasure. His stubby black lashes were lowered; his prickly head was bent over his plate. He was so certain of being loved, here if no place else. She looked away.
After supper she helped with the dishes, placing each clean plate and glass on open wooden shelves whose edges had grown