Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [72]
We have all been fine tho Linda was out of school one day last week. A case of “math test-itis” it looked like to me, ha ha! She says to send you lots of hugs and kisses. Drop us a line real soon, hear?
Cody felt he had just found the proper tone toward the end; he was sorry to run out of space. He signed the letter Luv, Sue (Mrs. Harold Alexander III), and sealed, stamped, and addressed it. Then he placed it in a business envelope, and wrote a note to his old college roommate in Dallas, asking if he would please drop the enclosed in the nearest mailbox.
That weekend he didn’t go home, and his reward was to dream about Ruth. She was waiting for a train that he was traveling on. He saw her on the platform, peering into the windows of each passenger car as it slid by. He was so eager to reach her, to watch her expression ease when she caught sight of him, that he called her name aloud and woke himself up. He heard it echoing in the dark—not her name, after all, but some meaningless sleep sound. For hours after that he tried to burrow back inside the dream, but he had lost it.
The next morning he began another letter, on the sheet headed PAULA. In a curlicued script, he wrote:
Dear Ruthie,
You old thing, don’t you keep in touch with your friends any more? I told Mama the other day, Mama that Ruth Spivey has forgotten all about us I believe.
Things here are not going too good. I guess you might have heard that me and Norman are separated. I know you liked him, but you had no idea how tiresome he could be, always so slow and quiet, he got on my nerves. Ruthie stay clear of those pale blond thoughtful kind of men, they’re a real disappointment. Go for someone dark and interesting who will take you lots of places you’ve never been. I’m serious, I know what I’m talking about.
Mama sends you greetings and asks do you want her to sew you anything. She’s real crippled now with the arthritis in her knees and can only sit in her chair, has plenty of time for sewing.
See ya, Paula
That letter he mailed from Pennsylvania, when he visited a packing-crate plant the following Tuesday. And on Wednesday, from New York, he sent the blue sheet with LMR at the top.
Dear Ruth,
Had lunch with Donna the other day and she told me you were going with a real nice fellow. Was kind of hazy on the particulars but when she said his name was Tull and he came from Baltimore I knew it must be Cody. Everybody here knows Cody, we all just love him, he really is a good man at heart and has been misjudged for years by people who don’t understand him. Well, Ruthie, I guess you’re smarter than I gave you credit for, I always thought you’d settle for one of those dime-a-dozen blond types but now I see I was wrong.
I’ll be waiting for the details.
Love, Laurie May
“You went too far with that last letter,” Ruth told him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He was sitting on a kitchen stool, watching her cube meat. He’d come directly to the restaurant this Saturday—bypassing home, bypassing the farm—hoping to find her altered somehow, mystified, perhaps tossing him a speculative glance from time to time. Instead, she seemed cross. She slammed her cleaver on the chopping board. “Do you realize,” she asked, “that I went ahead and answered that first note? Not wanting someone to worry, I sent it back and said it wasn’t mine, there must be some mistake; went out specially and bought a stamp to mail it with. And would’ve sent the second back, too, only it didn’t have a return address. Then the third comes; well, you went too far.”
“I tend to do that,” Cody said regretfully.
Ruth slung the cleaver with a thunking sound. Cody was afraid the others—only Todd Duckett and Josiah, this early—would wonder what was wrong, but they didn’t even look around. Ezra was out front, chalking up tonight’s menu.
“Just what is your problem?” Ruth asked him. “Do you have something against me? You think I’m some Garrett County hick that you don’t want marrying