Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [67]
“I’m honestly not hungry,” Cody said.
“He’s full,” said Ruth, spitting it out.
“Well, what’ll you do, then? Isn’t this boring for you?”
“No, no, I’m interested,” Cody said.
He could look across the counter and into the dining room, where people sat chewing and swallowing and drinking, patting their mouths with napkins, breaking off chunks of bread. He wondered how Ezra could stand to spend his life at this.
When the first real flurry was over, Ruth and Ezra settled at the scrubbed wooden table in the center of the kitchen, and Cody joined them. Ezra ate some of Ruth’s chicken casserole. Ruth lit a small brown cigarette and tipped back in her chair to watch him. The cigarette smelled as if it were burning only by accident—like something spilled on the floor of an oven, or stuck to the underside of a saucepan. Cody, seated across from her, drank it in. “Eat, Cody, eat,” Ezra urged him. Cody just shook his head, not wanting to lose his chestful of Ruth’s smoke.
Meanwhile, the other cooks came and went, some of them sitting also to wolf various odd assortments of food while their kettles simmered untended. Ezra’s boyhood friend Josiah appeared, metamorphosed into an efficient grown man in starchy white, and he and Ruth had a talk about peeling the apples for her pie. Cody could not have cared less about her pie, but he was riveted by her offhand, slangy style of speech. She held her cigarette between thumb and index finger, with her elbow propped against her rib cage. She hunkered forward to consider some decision, and beneath her knotted brows her eyes were so pale a blue that he was startled.
They left the restaurant before it closed. Josiah would lock up, Ezra said. They took a roundabout route home, down a quiet, one-way street, to drop Ruth off at the house where she rented a room. When Ezra accompanied her up the front steps, Cody waited on the curb. He watched Ezra kiss her good night—a bumbling, inadequate kiss, Cody judged it; and he felt some satisfaction. Then Ezra rejoined him and galumphed along beside him, big footed and blithe. “Isn’t she something?” he asked Cody. “Don’t you just love her?”
“Mm.”
“But there’s so much I need to find out from you! I want to take good care of her, but I don’t know how. What about life insurance? Things like that! So much is expected of husbands, Cody. Will you help me figure it out?”
“I’ll be glad to,” Cody said. He meant it, too. Anything: any little crack that would provide him with an entrance.
Eventually, Ezra subsided, although he continued to give the impression of inwardly bubbling and chortling. From time to time, he hummed a few bars of something underneath his breath. And then when they were almost home—passing houses totally dark, where everyone had long since gone to sleep—what should he do but pull out that damned recorder of his and start piping away. It was embarrassing. It was infuriating: “Le Godiveau de Poisson,” once again. Depend on Ezra, Cody thought, to have as his theme song a recipe for a seafood dish. He walked along in silence, hoping someone would call the police. Or at least, that they’d open a window. “You there! Quiet!” But no one did. It was so typical: Ezra the golden boy, everybody’s favorite, tootling down the streets scot-free.
On Sunday morning, Cody presented himself at Ruth’s door—or rather, at the door of the faded, doughy lady who owned the house Ruth stayed in. This lady toyed so fearfully with the locket at her throat that Cody felt compelled to take a step backward, proving he was not a knock-and-rob man. He gave her his most gentlemanly smile. “Good morning,” he said. “Is Ruth home?”
“Ruth?”
He realized he didn’t know Ruth’s last name. “I’m Ezra Tull’s brother,” he said.
“Oh, Ezra,” she said, and she stood back to let him enter.
He followed her deep into the interior, past a tumult of overstuffed furniture and dusty wax fruit and heaps of magazines. In the kitchen, Ruth slouched at the table spooning up cornflakes and reading a newspaper propped against a cereal box. A pale, pudgy man stood gazing into