Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [49]
“How are you, Josiah?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, not bad.”
“So you work here now.”
“I’m the salad chef. Mostly, I cut things up.”
His spidery hands twisted in front of him. The crease in his forehead seemed deeper than ever.
“I’ve thought of you often,” Jenny said.
She didn’t mean it, at first. But then she understood, with a rush to her head that was something like illness, that she spoke the truth: she had been thinking of him all these years without knowing it. It seemed he had never once left her mind. Even Harley, she saw, was just a reverse kind of Josiah, a Josiah turned inside out: equally alien, black-and-white, incomprehensible to anyone but Jenny.
“Is your mother well?” she asked him.
“She died.”
“Died!”
“A long time ago. She went out shopping and she died. I live in my house all alone now.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said.
But still he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Ezra turned from Oakes and asked, “Are you sure I can’t get you a snack, Jenny?”
“I have to leave,” she told him.
Going home, she wondered why the walk seemed so long. Her feet felt unusually heavy, and there was some old, rusty pain deep inside her chest.
The ash grove, how graceful, Ezra’s recorder piped out, how sweetly his singing … Waking slowly, still webbed in bits of dreams, Jenny found it strange that a pearwood recorder should put forth plums—perfectly round, pure, plummy notes arriving in a spill on her bed. She sat up and thought for a moment. Then she pushed her blankets back and reached for her clothes.
Ezra was playing “Le Godiveau de Poisson” when she left the house.
Down this street, and then that one, and then another that turned out to be a mistake. She had to retrace her path. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sidewalks were still wet, but the sun was rising in a pearly pink sky above the chimneys. She dug her hands in her coat pockets. She met an old man walking a poodle, but no one else, and even he passed soundlessly and vanished.
When she reached the street she wanted, nothing looked familiar and she had to take the alley. She could only find the house from the rear. She recognized that makeshift gray addition behind the kitchen, and the buckling steps that gave beneath her feet, and the wooden door with most of its paint worn off. She looked for a bell to ring but there wasn’t one; she had to knock. There was the scraping of furniture somewhere inside the house—chair legs pushing back. Josiah, when he came, was so tall that he darkened the window she peered through.
He opened the door. “Jenny?” he said.
“Hello, Josiah.”
He looked around him, as if supposing she had come to see someone else. She noticed his breakfast on the kitchen table: a slice of white bread spread with peanut butter. In the scuffed linoleum and the sink full of dirty dishes, in his tattered jeans and raveling brown sweater, she read neglect and hopelessness. She pulled her coat tighter around her.
“What are you, what are you here for?” he asked.
“I did everything wrong,” she told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“You must feel I’m just like the others! Just like the ones you want to escape from, off in the woods with your sleeping bag.”
“Oh, no, Jenny,” he said. “I would never believe you’re like that.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Nobody would; you’re too pretty.”
“But I mean—” she said.
She set a hand on his sleeve. He didn’t pull away. Then she stepped closer and slipped her arms around him. She could feel, even through her coat, how thin and bony his rib cage was, and how he warmed his skimpy sweater. She laid her ear against his chest, and he slowly, hesitantly raised his hands to her shoulders. “I should have gone on kissing you,” she said. “I should have told my mother, ‘Go away. Leave us alone.’ I should have stood up for you and not been such a coward.”
“No, no,” she heard him say. “I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it.”
She drew back and looked up at him.
“I don’t talk about it,” he said.
“Josiah,” she said, “won’t you