Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [81]
She called frantically, day after day, often letting the phone ring thirty or forty times. There was something calming about that faraway purling sound. She was, at least, connected—though only to an object in Cody’s apartment.
Then he answered. It was late in October. She was so taken aback that she didn’t know what to say. It seemed the monotonous ring of the phone had grown to be enough for her. “Um, Cody …” she said.
“Oh. Mother.”
“Cody, where have you been?”
“I had a job to see to in Ohio. I took Ruth along.”
“You didn’t answer the phone for weeks, and we looked for you out at the farm and some of the windows were broken.”
“Damn! I thought I was paying Jared to keep that kind of thing from happening.”
“You can’t imagine how I felt, Cody. When I heard about the windows I felt … You’re letting that place go to rack and ruin and we never get to see you any more.”
“I do have a job to do, Mother.”
“I thought that once you married, you were moving down to Baltimore. You were doing over the farmhouse and planting a garden and all.”
“Yes, definitely. That’s a definite possibility,” said Cody. “Get Ezra to tape those windows, will you? And tell him to speak to Jared. I can’t have the place depreciating.”
“All right, Cody,” she said.
Then she asked about Thanksgiving. “Will you be coming down? You know how Ezra likes to have us at the restaurant.”
“Oh, Ezra and his restaurant …”
“Please. We’ve hardly seen you,” she said.
“Well, maybe.”
So in November they returned—Cody looking elegant and casual, Ruth incongruous in a large, ornate blue dress. Her hair was so stubby, her head so Small, that the dress appeared to be drowning her. She staggered in her high-heeled shoes. She still would not meet Ezra’s gaze.
“What have you two been up to?” Pearl asked Ruth, as they rode in Cody’s Cadillac to the restaurant.
“Oh, nothing so much.”
“Are you decorating Cody’s apartment?”
“Decorating? No.”
“We’ve hardly seen it,” Cody said. “I’m taking on longer-term jobs. In December I start reorganizing a textile plant in Georgia, a big thing, five or six months. I thought maybe Ruth could come with me; we could rent us a little house of some kind. There’s not much point in commuting.”
“December? But then you’d miss Christmas,” said Pearl.
Cody looked surprised. He said, “Why would we miss it?”
“I mean, would you still make the trip to Baltimore?”
“Oh. Well, no, I guess not,” he said. “But we’re here for Thanksgiving, aren’t we?”
She resolved to say no more. She had her dignity.
They sat at their regular family table, surrounded by a fair-sized crowd. (In those days—the start of the sixties—shaggy young people had just discovered Ezra’s restaurant, with its stripped wood and pure, fresh food, and they thronged there every evening.) It was sad that Jenny couldn’t come; she was spending the holiday with her in-laws. But Ruth, at least, rounded out their number. Pearl smiled across the table at her. Ruth said, “It feels right funny to be eating where I used to be cooking.”
“Would you like to visit the kitchen?” Ezra asked. “The staff would enjoy seeing you.”
“I don’t mind if I do,” she said. It was the first time since her marriage that she’d looked at him directly—or the first that Pearl knew about.
So Ezra scraped back his chair and rose, and guided Ruth into the kitchen. Pearl could tell that Cody wasn’t pleased. He stopped in the act of unfolding his napkin and gazed after them, even taking a breath as if preparing to object. Then he must have thought better of it. He shook out the napkin angrily, saying nothing.
“So,” said Pearl. “When do you move to the farm?”
“Farm? Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Everything’s so changed; the whole character of my work has changed.” He looked again toward the kitchen.
“But you’d planned on raising a family there. It was all you ever talked about.”
“Yes, well, and these long-term contracts,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her.
Pearl