Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [79]
Then Ezra arrived—not whistling, oddly quiet, as he’d been since Ruth had left. He stopped inside the door and looked at them. “Ezra,” Cody said easily, and Ruth stood up and held out her hand. She seemed frightened. This made Pearl like her, a little. (Ruth, at least, recognized the magnitude of what they’d done.) “How you doing, Ezra,” Ruth said, quavering. And Ezra had said … oh, something or other, he’d managed something; and stood around a while shifting from foot to foot and answering their small talk. So it looked, on the surface, as if they might eventually smooth things over. Yes, after all, this choosing of mates was such a small, brief stage in a family’s history.
But Ezra no longer played tunes on his recorder, and he continued to look limp and beaten, and he went to bed every night with no more than a “Good night, Mother.” She grieved for him. She longed to say, “Ezra, believe me, she’s nothing! You’re worth a dozen Ruth Spiveys! A dozen of both of them, to be frank, even if Cody is my son …” Though of course she loved Cody dearly. But from infancy, he had batted her away; and his sister had been so evasive, somehow; so whom did that leave but Ezra? Ezra was all she had. He was the only one who would let her in. Sometimes, in his childhood, she had worried that he would die young—one of life’s ironic twists, to take what you valued most. She had watched him trudging down the street to school, his duck-yellow head bowed in thought, and she would have a sudden presentiment that this was the last she would see of him. Then when he returned, full of news about friends and ball games, how solid, how commonplace—even how irritating—he seemed! And sometimes, long ago when he was small, he might climb up into her lap and place his thin little arms around her neck, and she would drink in his smell of warm biscuits and think, “Really, this is what it’s all about. This is what I’m alive for.” Then, reluctantly, she allowed him to slip away again. (They claimed she was possessive, pushy. Little did they know.) As a child, he’d had a chirpy style of talking that was so cheerful, ringing through the house like a trill of water … when had that begun to change? As an older boy he grew shy and withdrawn, gazing out of shining gray eyes and saying next to nothing. She’d worried when he didn’t date. “Wouldn’t you like to bring someone home? Ask someone to Sunday dinner?” He shook his head, tongue-tied. He blushed and lowered his long lashes. Pearl wondered, seeing the blush, whether he thought much about girls and such as that. His father had left by then and Cody was no help, three years older, off tomcatting someplace or other. Then as a man, Ezra was … well, to be honest, he was not much different from when he was a boy. In a way, he was an eternal boy, never got boastful and brash like most men but stayed gentle, somber, contentedly running that restaurant of his and coming home peaceful and tired.
It was a shock when he introduced her to Ruth. What an urchin she was! But plainly, Ezra adored her. “Mother, I’d like you to meet my—meet Ruth.” Pearl had stalled a little, at first. Maybe she had failed to act properly welcoming. Well, who could blame her? And now, seeing how things had turned out, who could say she’d been wrong? But she can’t help wondering, anyhow … If she’d been a little more encouraging, they might have married sooner. They might have married before Cody could work his mischief. Or if she had let herself realize … Yes, she wonders over and over again: if she’d mentioned Cody’s plot to Ezra, stopped that situation that was not so much a courtship as a landslide, a kind of gathering and falling of events …
Ridiculous, of course, to imagine that anything she did