Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (32 page)

“What year are you in school?” Dan asked Luke.

“I’m going into ninth grade.”

“Read any Hemingway?
Catcher in the Rye?
What are they giving you to read?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m new,” said Luke.

He could easily picture Dan as a teacher. He would wear his jeans in the classroom. He’d be one of those casual, comradely types that Luke had never quite trusted. Better to have him in suit and tie; at least then you knew where you stood.

“In Washington,” Sammy said, “there’s
two
girls, Patty and Lena.”

“Don’t say girls, say women,” Dan told him.

“Patty Sears and Lena Sparrow.”

“I’m better on the S’s,” Dan said to Luke. “They were in my homeroom.”

“Lena we hear is separated,” Sammy said.

Luke said, “But what do you do when you visit? What is there to do?”

“Oh, sit around,” Sammy said. “Stay a few days if they ask us. Play with their dogs and their cats and their kids. Most of them do have kids. And husbands.”

“Well, then,” said Luke. “If they’ve got husbands …”

“But we don’t know that till we get there. Do we,” Sammy said.

“Sammy’s a little mixed up,” Dan said. “It’s not as though we’re hunting replacements. We’re just traveling. This divorce has come as a shock and I’m just, oh, traveling back. I’m visiting old friends.”

“But only
girl
friends,” Sammy pointed out.

“They’re girls I used to get along fine with. Not sweethearts, necessarily. But they liked me; they thought I was fine. Or at least, they seemed to. I assumed they did. I don’t know). Maybe they were just acting polite. Maybe I was a mess all along.”

Luke couldn’t think what to say.

“So listen!” Dan told him. “You read
The Great Gatsby
yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about
Lord of the Flies?
You get to
Lord of the Flies?
”

“I haven’t read anything,” said Luke. “I’ve been moved around a lot; anyplace I go they’re doing
Silas Marner.
”

This seemed to throw Dan into some kind of depression. His shoulders sagged and he said no more.

Sammy finally stopped bouncing and sat back with a
Jack and Jill
. Pages turned, rattling in the hot wind that blew through the car. On the seat between Dan and Luke, Dan’s address list fluttered. It didn’t seem very long. Four or five sheets of paper, two columns to a sheet; it would be used up in no time. Luke said, “Um …”

Dan looked over at him.

“You must have gone to college,” Luke said.

“Yes.”

“Or even graduate school.”

“Just college.”

“Don’t you have some addresses from there?”

“College isn’t the same,” said Dan. “I wouldn’t be going far enough back. Why,” he said, struck by a thought, “college is where I met my wife!”

“Oh, I see,” Luke said.

Outside Washington, Dan stopped the car to let him off. On the horizon was a haze of buildings that Dan said was Alexandria. “Alexandria, Virginia?” Luke asked. He didn’t understand what that had to do with Washington. But Dan, who seemed in a hurry, was already glancing in his side-view mirror. Sammy hung out the window calling, “Bye, Luke! When will I see you again? Will you come and visit when we find a place? Write me a letter, Luke!”

“Sure,” said Luke, waving. The car rolled off.

By now it must be four o’clock, at least, but it didn’t seem to Luke that he felt any cooler. His eyes ached from squinting in the sunlight. His hair had grown stringy and stiff. Something
about this road, though—the foreign smells of tar and diesel fuel, or the roar of traffic—made him believe for the first time that he really was getting somewhere. He was confident he’d be picked up sooner or later. He thumbed a while, walked a few yards, stopped to thumb again. He had turned to begin another walk when a car slammed on its brakes, veering to the shoulder in front of him. “For God’s sake,” a woman called. “Get in this instant, you hear?”

He opened the door and got in. It was a Dodge, not nearly as old as Dan’s car but almost as worn-looking, as if it had been used a great deal. The woman inside was plump and fortyish. Her eyes were swollen and tears had streaked her cheeks, but he trusted her anyhow; you’d think she was his mother, the way she scolded him. “Are you out of your mind? Do you want to get killed? Do you know the kind of perverts in this world? Make sure your door’s shut.
Lock
it, dammit; we’re not in downtown Sleepy Hollow. Fasten your seat belt. Hook up your shoulder harness.”

He was happy to obey. He adjusted some complicated kind of buckle while the woman, sniffling, ground the gears and shot back into traffic. “What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Luke.”

“Well, Luke, are you a total idiot? Does your mother know you’re hitching rides? Where are your parents in all of this?”

“Oh, ah, Baltimore,” he said. “I don’t guess you would be going there.”

“God, no, what would I want with Baltimore?”

“Well, where
are
you going?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

“You don’t know?”

He looked at her. The tears were streaming down her cheeks again. “Um, maybe—” he said.

“Oh, relax. Never mind, I’ll take you on to Baltimore.”

“You will?”

“It’s better than circling the Beltway forever.”

“Golly, thanks,” he said.

“They’re letting infants out on their own these days.”

“I’m not an infant.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Sex crimes! Muggings! Murders! Things that make no sense.”

“So what? I’ve been traveling on my own a
long
time. Years,” he said. “Ever since I was born, almost.”

“For all you know,” she told him, “I could be holding you for ransom.”

This startled a laugh out of him. She glanced over and gave a sad smile. There was something reassuring about the comfortable mound of her stomach, the denim skirt riding up her stocky legs, the grayish-white tennis shoes. Periodically, she swabbed at the tip of her nose with her knuckles. He noticed that she wore a wedding ring, and had worn it for so long it looked embedded in her finger.

“Just two or three miles ahead, not a month ago,” she said, “a boy in a sports car stopped to pick up a girl and she smashed in his skull with a flashlight, rolled him down an embankment, and drove away in his sports car.”

“That proves it’s you doing something dangerous, not me,” he pointed out. (How easy it was to fall into the bantering, argumentative tone reserved for mothers!) “What did you pick me up for? I could be planning to kill you.”

“Oh, indeed,” she said, sniffling again. “You wouldn’t happen to have a Kleenex on you, by any chance?”

“No, sorry.”

“I’d never stop for just anyone,” she told him. “Only if they’re in danger—I mean young girls alone, or infants like you.”

“I am not an—”

“Yesterday it was a girl in short shorts, can you believe it? I told her; I said, ‘Honey, you’re inviting trouble, dressed like that.’ Day before, it was a twelve-year-old boy. He said he’d been robbed of his bus fare and had to get home as best he could. Day before that—”

“What, you drive here every day?”

“Most days.”

He looked out the window at the vans and oil tankers, interstate
buses, cars with their overloaded luggage racks. “I had sort of thought this was a long-
range
highway,” he said.

“Oh, no. Heavens, no. No, I live right nearby,” she told him.

“Then what are you driving around for?”

Her chin crumpled in. “None of your business,” she said.

“Oh.”

“What it is, you see, I generally do this from two or three in the afternoon till suppertime. Sometimes I go to Annapolis, sometimes off in Virginia someplace. Sometimes just round and round the Beltway. It all depends,” she said. She tossed him a look, as if expecting him to ask what it all depended on, but he had been insulted and said nothing. She sighed. “Two or three o’clock is when my daughter wakes up. My daughter is fourteen years old. Just about your age, right? How old are you?”

He drummed his fingers and looked out the window.

“In the summer, she sleeps forever. My husband says, ‘Jeepers, Mag.’ He says, ‘Why do you let her sleep so late?’ Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because she’s impossible. Truly impossible. I mean, it isn’t believable that she could be so awful. She comes downstairs in her bathrobe, yawning. Finds me in the kitchen. Says, ‘Well, Ma, I see you’re wearing your insecticide perfume again. DDT Number Five.’ Then she floats away. Leaving me sniffing my wrists and wondering. I say, ‘Liddie, are you going to clean your room today?’ and she says, ‘Listen to you, sniping and griping; you sound exactly like your mother.’ I make a little joke; she says, ‘Very funny, Ma. Ha ha. The big comedian.’ I find she’s stolen my best lace bra that I only wear on my anniversary and she flings it back all grimy at the seams: ‘Take it, who wants it, it’s too flat-chested anyhow.’ To my face, she calls me a bitch, says I’m fat and homely, says she hates me, and I say, ‘Listen here, young lady, it’s time we got a few things straight,’ but all she does is yawn and start chewing one of those plastic price-tag strings off the sleeve of her blouse. I tell my husband, ‘Speak to her,’ so he says, ‘Liddie,
you
know how your mother gets. Why do you upset her?’ I say, ‘How I get? What do you mean, how I get?’ and before you know, it’s him and
me fighting, which may have been her plan all along. Division. Disruption. Chaos. That’s what she enjoys. She’s got this boyfriend, treats him terribly. Finally he broke up with her, and she cried all night and asked a hundred times, ‘Why did I act like I did? What can I do to change his mind?’ I told her to be honest, just phone him and say she didn’t know what had got into her; so next morning she phoned, and they made up, and everything was wonderful and she came and thanked me for my good advice. Her life was back in order, it looked like. So she sat at the table a while, calm as I’ve seen her. Then she started swinging her foot. Then she started picking her fingernails. Then she went and phoned her boyfriend again. Said, ‘Roger, I didn’t want to tell you this but I thought it’s time you knew. The doctor says I’m dying of leukemia.’ ”

Luke laughed. She looked over at him innocently, but he noticed a wry, proud twist at the corners of her mouth. “Around two or three o’clock,” she said, “I get in my car and start driving. At first, I’m talking out loud. You ought to see me. ‘I’m never coming back,’ I say. I’m cursing through my teeth; I’m honking at crippled old ladies. ‘That little wretch, that pest, that spoiled brat,’ I say. ‘She’ll be sorry!’ I speed along—oh, you ought to see my traffic record! One more point on my license and I’ll have to take that Saturday course on the evils of reckless driving; have to watch that movie where the lady ends up decapitated. Well, at least it’ll get me out of the house. I sling the car around and don’t let other cars ahead of me and I picture how my husband will come home and say, ‘Liddie? Where is your mother? What did you
do
to her, Liddie?’ and Liddie will feel just awful … but then I think of my husband. I have a really nice husband. It’s not him I want to leave. And I wonder if I could sneak back home at night and tell him, ‘Psst! Let’s
both
leave. Let’s elope,’ I’ll say. But I know he wouldn’t do it. He’s not as much involved. She annoys him but he’s not around enough to make any serious mistakes with her. That’s what kills me: making mistakes. Overreacting, letting her get to me … oh, I can think of so many! You could say that what I’m
leaving behind is my own poor view of me, right? So then I start driving slower. I start remembering things. I think of Liddie when she was small: she always stood so straight. You could pick her out of a crowd by her straight little back. And for one whole year she would only eat with chopsticks. Click-click against her plate … you ought to have seen the mess! But I didn’t mind. In those days, she liked me a lot. I was a really good mother, and she liked me.”

“Maybe she
still
likes you,” Luke said doubtfully.

“No,” said the woman. “She doesn’t.”

They passed a sign for Baltimore. The countryside seemed endlessly the same—fields of high grass, then the backsides of housing developments with clotheslines and motorcycles and aboveground, circular swimming pools, then fields of high grass again, as if the scenery came around regularly on a giant conveyor belt.

“What it is,” said the woman, “it’s like I’m driving till I find her past self. You know? And
my
past self. Then mile by mile, I simmer down. I let up on the gas a bit more. So by suppertime, I’m ready to come home again.”

Luke checked the clock on her dashboard. It was four thirty-five.

“Tonight I’ll just fix a tuna salad,” she said.

“Well, I appreciate your doing this.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, and she gave a final swipe to her nose.

By five o’clock, they had reached the outskirts of Baltimore. It was something like entering a piece of machinery, Luke thought—all sooty and cluttered and churning. The woman seemed used to it; she drove without comment. “Now, tell me what to do after Russell Street,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“How do I find your house?”

“Oh,” he said, “why don’t you just drop me off downtown.”

“Where downtown?”

“Anyplace will do.” She looked over at him.

He said, “I live so near, I mean …”

“Near to where?”

“Why, to anywhere.”

“Now, listen, Luke,” she said. “I’m getting a very odd feeling here. I want to know exactly where your parents are.”

He wondered what she would do if he told her he had to look them up in the telephone book. He’d been away so long, he would say, at summer camp or someplace, the address had just slipped his … no. But the fact was, he had never known Ezra’s street address. It was just a house they arrived at, Cody driving, Luke sitting in back.

“The thing of it is,” he said, “they’re both at work. They own this restaurant, the Homesick Restaurant. Maybe you could drop me off at the restaurant.”

“Where is that?”

“Ah …”

“There is no such place, is there,” she said. “I knew it! Homesick Restaurant, indeed.”