Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [71]
“You don’t understand,” said Cody.
“This may come as a shock,” his mother told him, “but I understand you perfectly. With the rest of the world I might not be so smart, but with my three children, why, not the least little thing escapes me. I know everything you’re after. I see everything in your heart, Cody Tull.”
“Just like God,” Cody said.
“Just like God,” she agreed.
Ezra arranged a celebration dinner for the evening before Jenny’s wedding—a Friday. But Thursday night, Jenny phoned Cody at his apartment. It was a local call; she said she wasn’t ten blocks away, staying at a hotel with Sam Wiley. “We got married yesterday morning,” she said, “and now we’re on our honeymoon. So there won’t be any dinner after all.”
“Well, how did all this come about?” Cody asked.
“Mother and Sam had a little disagreement.”
“I see.”
“Mother said … and Sam told her … and I said, ‘Oh, Sam, why not let’s just …’ Only I do feel bad about Ezra. I know how much trouble he’s gone to.”
“By now, he ought to be used to this,” Cody said.
“He was going to serve a suckling pig.”
Hadn’t Ezra noticed (Cody wondered) that the family as a whole had never yet finished one of his dinners? That they’d fight and stamp off halfway through, or sometimes not even manage to get seated in the first place? Well, of course he must have noticed, but was it clear to him as a pattern, a theme? No, perhaps he viewed each dinner as a unit in itself, unconnected to the others. Maybe he never linked them in his mind.
Assuming he was a total idiot.
It was true that once—to celebrate Cody’s new business—they had made it all the way to dessert; so if they hadn’t ordered dessert you could say they’d completed the meal. But the fact was, they did order dessert, which was left to sag on the plates when their mother accused Cody of deliberately setting up shop as far from home as possible. There was a stiff-backed little quarrel. Conversation fell apart. Cody walked out. So technically, even that meal could not be considered finished. Why did Ezra go on trying?
Why did the rest of them go on showing up, was more to the point.
In fact, they probably saw more of each other than happy families did. It was almost as if what they couldn’t get right, they had to keep returning to. (So if they ever did finish a dinner, would they rise and say goodbye forever after?)
Once Jenny had hung up, Cody sat on the couch and leafed through the morning’s mail. Something made him feel unsettled. He wondered how Jenny could have married Sam Wiley—a scrawny little artist type, shifty eyed and cocky. He wondered if Ezra would cancel his dinner altogether or merely postpone it till after the honeymoon. He pictured Ruth in the restaurant kitchen, her wrinkled little fingers patting flour on drumsticks. He scanned an ad for life insurance and wondered why no one depended on him—not even enough to require his insurance money if he should happen to die.
He ripped open an envelope marked AMAZING OFFER! and found three stationery samples and a glossy order blank. One sample was blue, with LMR embossed at the top. Another had a lacy PAULA, the P entwined with a morning-glory vine, and the third was one of those letters that form their own envelopes when folded. The flap was printed with butterflies and Mrs. Harold Alexander III, 219 Saint Beulah Boulevard, Dallas, Texas. He studied that for a moment. Then he took a pen from his shirt pocket, and started writing in an unaccustomed, backhand slant:
Dear Ruth,
Just a line to say hey from all of us. How’s the job going? What do you think of Baltimore? Harold says ask if you met a young man yet. He had the funniest dream last night, dreamed he saw you with someone tall, black hair