Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [80]
She opens the farmhouse parlor to air it. It smells like skunk. She leaves the front door ajar, taking care not to step onto the porch, which could very well give way beneath her. She remembers how, toward the end of that first week after the honeymoon, she asked Ezra to bring out to Ruth a few odds and ends for the farm—some extra pans, some linens, a carpet sweeper she had no use for. Was there an ulterior motive in her suggestion? If not, why didn’t she accompany him, visit the bride like any good mother-in-law? “Please, I don’t want to,” Ezra said, but she said, “Honey. Go.” She hadn’t had any conscious design—truly, none at all—but it was a fact that later that morning, dawdling over the dishes, she’d allowed herself a little daydream: Ezra coming up behind Ruth, setting his arms around her, Ruth protesting only briefly before collapsing against him … Oh, shouldn’t it be possible to undo what was done? What all of them had done?
But Ezra when he returned was as subdued as ever, and only said that Ruth thanked Pearl for the pans and linens but was sending back the carpet sweeper as the farmhouse had no carpets.
Then Saturday, Cody came storming in with everything Ezra had taken to Ruth. “What’s all this?” he asked Pearl.
“Why, Cody, pots and sheets, as you can surely see.”
“How come Ezra brought them out?”
“I asked him to,” she said.
“I won’t have it! Won’t have him hanging around the farm.”
“Cody. It was at my request. Believe me,” she told him.
“I do,” he said.
She tried to get Ezra to go again the following week—taking the rug from the dining room and the carpet sweeper, once more—but he wouldn’t. “I’m not comfortable there,” he said. “There’s no point. What’s the point?” She supposed he was right. Yes, she thought, let Ruth wonder where he’d got to! People who leave us will be sorry in the end. She imagined Ruth alone in the farmhouse, roaming from room to room and peering sadly through the bare windows.
The next weekend, Pearl asked Ezra to drive her out. He couldn’t very well refuse; he was her only means of transportation. They both, without discussing it, wore Sunday clothing—formal, guestlike clothing. They found the house looking sealed and abandoned. A lone hound nudged at a bone in the yard, but he surely didn’t belong there.
Back home, Pearl placed a call to Cody in New York. “Aren’t you coming to the farm any more?”
“Things are kind of busy.”
“Won’t Ruth be there during the week?”
“I want her here with me,” he said. “After all, we just did get married.”
“Well, when will we see you?”
“Pretty soon, not too long, I’m sure we’ll be down in a while …”
But they weren’t; or if they were, they didn’t tell Pearl, and she was too proud to ask again. The summer ended and the leaves turned all colors, but Ezra dragged himself along with no change. “Sweetheart,” Pearl told him, as in his boyhood, “isn’t there someone you’d like to have home? Some friend to dinner? Anyone,” she said. Ezra said no.
From time to time, Pearl called Cody in New York again. He was courteous and noncommittal. Ruth, if she spoke, gave flustered replies and didn’t seem to have her wits about her. Then in October, two full weeks went by when no one answered the phone at all. Pearl wondered if they’d gone to the farm, and she begged Ezra to investigate. But when he finally agreed to, he found nobody there. “Someone’s shattered four windowpanes,” he reported. “Threw rocks at them, or shot them out.” This made Pearl feel frightened. The world was closing in on them; even here on her own familiar streets, she no longer felt safe. And who knew what might have become of Ruth and Cody? They could be lying dead in their apartment, victims of a burglary or some bizarre, New York-type accident, their bodies undiscovered for weeks. Oh, this