Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

8 This Really Happened

The summer before Luke Tull turned fourteen, his father had a serious accident at the factory he was inspecting. A girder swung around on its cable, hit Luke’s father and the foreman standing next to him, and swept them both off the walkway and down to the lower level of the factory. The foreman was killed. Cody lived, by some miracle, but he was badly hurt. For two days he lay in a coma. There was a question of brain damage, till he woke and, in his normal, crusty way, asked who the hell was in charge around here.

Three weeks later, he came home by ambulance. His thick black hair had been shaved off one side of his head, where a gauze patch covered the worst of his wounds. His face — ordinarily lean and tanned — was swollen across one cheekbone and turning different shades of yellow from slowly fading bruises. His ribs were taped and an arm and a leg were in casts — the right arm and the left leg, so he couldn’t use crutches. He was forced to lie in bed, cursing the game shows on TV. “Fools. Jackasses. Who do they think would be watching this crap?”

Luke’s mother, who had always been so spirited, lost something important to the accident. First, in the terrible coma days, she drifted around in a wash of tears — a small, wan, pink-eyed woman. Her red hair seemed drained of color. Luke would say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t hear, would sometimes snatch up her car keys as if mistaking who had called and go tearing off to the hospital again, leaving Luke alone. Even after the coma ended, it didn’t seem she came back completely. When Cody was brought home, she sat by his bed for hours saying nothing, lightly stroking one thick vein that ran down the inside of his wrist. She watched the game shows with a tremulous smile. “Jesus, look at them squawk,” Cody said disgustedly, and Ruth bent down and laid her cheek against his hand as if he’d uttered something wonderful.

Luke, who had once been the center of her world, now hung around the fringes. It was July and he had nothing to do. They’d only been living here — in a suburb of Petersburg, Virginia — since the end of the school year, and he didn’t know any boys his own age. The children on his block were all younger, thin voiced and excitable. It annoyed him to hear their shrieking games of roll-a-bat and the sputtery ksh! kshew! of their imaginary rifles. Toddlers were packed into flowered vinyl wading pools which they spent their mornings emptying, measuring cup by measuring cup, till every yard was a sea of mud. Luke could not remember ever being that young. Floating through the icy, white and gold elegance of the rented colonial-style house, he surfaced in various gilt-framed mirrors: someone awkward and unwanted, lurching on legs grown too long to manage, his face past cuteness but not yet solidified into anything better — an oval, fragile face, a sweep of streaky blond hair, a mouthful of braces that made his lips appear irregular and vulnerable. His jeans were getting too short but he had no idea how to go about buying new ones. He was accustomed to relying on his mother for such things. In the old days, his mother had done everything for him. She had got on his nerves, as a matter of fact.

Now he made his own breakfast — Cheerios or shredded wheat — and a sandwich for lunch. His mother cooked supper, but it was something slapped together, not her usual style at all; and mostly she would let Luke eat alone in the kitchen while she and Cody shared a tray in the bedroom. Or if she stayed with Luke, her talk was still of Cody. She never asked Luke about himself, no; it was “your daddy” this and “your daddy” that, never a thing but “your daddy.” How well he was bearing up, how he’d always borne up, always been so dependable from the earliest time she had known him. “I was not but nineteen when I met him,” she said, “and he was thirty years old. I was a homely chit of a girl and he was the handsomest thing you ever saw, so fine mannered and wearing this perfect gray suit. At the time, I was all set to marry Ezra, your daddy’s brother. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? Oh, I got around, in those days! Then your daddy stepped in. He was brazen as you please. Didn’t care how it looked, didn’t have an ounce of shame, just moved right in and claimed me for his own. Well, first I thought he was teasing. He could have had anyone, any girl he liked, somebody beautiful even. Then I saw he meant it. I didn’t know which way to turn, for I did love your Uncle Ezra, though he was not so … I mean, Ezra was a much plainer person, more like me, you would say. But your daddy’d walk into the room and it seemed like, I don’t know, the air just came alive, somehow. He put his hands on my shoulders one day and I told him please, I was engaged to marry Ezra, and he said he knew that. He stepped up close and I said really, Ezra was a good, good man, and he said yes, he was; and we hugged each other like two people sharing some bereavement and I said, ‘Why, you’re near about my brother-in-law!’ and he said, ‘Very nearly, yes,’ and he kissed me on the lips.”

Luke lowered his lashes. He wished she wouldn’t talk about such things.

“And if we’ve had our ups and downs,” she said, “well, I just want you to know that it wasn’t his fault, Luke. Look at me! I’m nothing but a little backwoods Garrett County farm girl, hardly educated. And I’m not so easy to get along with, either. I’m not so easygoing. You mustn’t blame him. Why, once — oh, you were in nursery school, I bet you don’t remember this — I packed you up and left him. I told him he didn’t love me and never had, only married me to spite his brother, Ezra, that he’d always been so jealous of. I accused him of terrible things, just terrible, and then while he was at work I carried you off to the railroad station and … this is funny now when I tell it, but it wasn’t then: while we were waiting on the bench a Marine threw up in my pocketbook. Came time to board the train and I just couldn’t make myself put my fingers in and get out the tickets, assuming they were still usable; and couldn’t bear to reach in for the money to buy more tickets, either. So I called your daddy on the telephone, begged a dime from a nun and said, ‘Cody, come and get me; this isn’t really what I want to be doing. Oh, Cody,’ I said, ‘we’ve got so interwoven; even if you didn’t love me at all, now we’re so entwined. It’s you I have to stay with.’ And he left off work and drove down to collect me, all steady and sure in his fine gray suit, nothing like the rest of the world. Don’t you remember that? You’ve forgotten all about it,” she said. “It’s just as well, I reckon. Luke, when you almost lose a person, everything comes so clear! You see how much he matters, how there’s no one the least bit like him; he’s irreplaceable. How he always puts us first; I mean, has never, in all his days, left you and me behind when he’s off on business, but carts us to every new town he’s called to because he won’t do like his father, he says: travel about forgetting his own relations. It’s not true that he brings us along because he doesn’t trust me. He really cares for our welfare. When I think now,” she said, “about your daddy kissing me that first time—‘Very nearly, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, very nearly your brother-in-law,’ and kissed me so quiet but definite, insisting, like he wouldn’t take no for an answer — why, I see now that’s when my life began! But at the time I had no notion, didn’t grasp the importance. I didn’t know back then that one person can have such effect on another.”

But if she was changed (if even Luke was changed — fading into someone transparent, he imagined), Cody was absolutely the same. After all, Cody hadn’t suffered the strain of that coma; he’d been absent from it. He hadn’t worried he would die, once he came to, because it wouldn’t occur to him that he was the type to die. He’d sailed through the whole experience with his usual combination of nonchalance and belligerence, and now he lay thrashing on his bed wondering when he could get up again. “What I mainly am is mad,” he told Luke. “This whole damn business has left me mad as hell. I felt that girder hit, you know that? I really felt it hit, and it hurt, and all the time I was flying through the air I wanted to hit it back, punch somebody; and now it seems I’m still waiting for the chance. When do I get to get even? And don’t talk to me about lawsuits, compensation. The only thing I want to do is hit that girder back.”

“Mom says would you like some soup,” said Luke, wiping his palms nervously down his thighs.

“No, I wouldn’t like soup. What’s she always trying to feed me for? Listen, Luke. If your grandma calls again today, I want you to tell her I’ve gone back to work.”

“To work?”

“I can’t stand to hear her fret on the phone any more.”

“But all along,” Luke said, “you’ve been telling her you were too sick for company. Yesterday you were too sick and today you’ve gone back to work? What’ll she think?”

“It’s nothing to me what she thinks,” said Cody. He never sounded very fond of Grandma Tull, who had called from Baltimore every day since the accident. Luke enjoyed her, the little he knew of her, but Cody said looks were deceiving. “She puts on a good front,” he told Luke. “You don’t know what she’s like. You don’t know what it was like growing up with her.”

Luke felt he did know (hadn’t he heard it all a million times?) but his father had got started now and wouldn’t be stopped. “Let me give you an example,” he said. “Listen, now. This really happened.” That was the way he always introduced his childhood. “This really happened,” he would say, as if it were unthinkable, beyond belief, but then what followed never seemed so terrible to Luke. “I swear it: your grandma had this friend named Emmaline that she hadn’t seen in years. Only friend she ever mentioned. And Emmaline lived in … I forget. Anyhow, someplace far away. So one Christmas I saved up the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to wherever this Emmaline lived. I slaved and borrowed and stole the money, and presented my mother with the ticket on Christmas morning. I was seventeen at the time, old enough to take care of the others, and I said, ‘You leave tomorrow, stay a week, and I’ll watch over things till you get back.’ And you know what she said? Listen; you won’t believe this. ‘But Cody, honey,’ she said. ‘Day after tomorrow is your brother’s birthday.’ ”

He looked over at Luke. Luke waited for him to go on.

“See,” Cody said, “December twenty-seventh was Ezra’s birthday.”

“So?” Luke asked.

“So she wouldn’t leave her precious boy on his birthday! Not even to visit her oldest, dearest, only friend, that her other boy had given her a ticket for.”

“I wouldn’t like for Mom to leave me on my birthday, either,” Luke said.

“No, no, you’re missing the point. She wouldn’t leave Ezra, her favorite. Me or my sister, she would surely leave.”

“How do you know that?” Luke asked him. “Did you ever try giving her a ticket on your birthday? I bet she’d have said the same thing.”

“My birthday is in February,” Cody said. “Nowhere near any occasion for gift giving. Oh, I don’t know why I bother talking to you. You’re an only child, that’s your trouble. You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m trying to get across.” And he turned his pillow over and settled back with a sigh.

Luke went out in the yard and threw his baseball against the garage. It thudded and bounced back, shimmering in the sunlight. In the old days, his mother had practiced throwing with him. She had taught him to bat and pitch overhand, too. She was good at sports. He saw glimpses in her, sometimes, of the scatty little tomboy she must once have been. But it had always seemed, when they played ball together, that this was only a preparation for the real game, with his father. It was like cramming for an exam. Then on weekends Cody came home and pitched the ball to him and said, “Not bad. Not bad at all,” when Luke hit it out of the yard. At these moments Luke was conscious of adding a certain swagger to his walk, a certain swing to his shoulders. He imagined he was growing to be more like his father. Sauntering into the house after practice, he’d pass Cody’s parked car and ask, “She still getting pretty good mileage?” He would stand in front of the open refrigerator and swig iced tea directly from the pitcher — something his mother detested. Oh, it was time to put his mother behind him now — all those years of following her through the house, enmeshed in her routine, dragging his toy broom after her big one or leaning both elbows on her dressing table to watch, entranced, as she dusted powder on her freckled nose. The dailiness of women’s lives! He knew all he cared to know about it. He was exhausted by the trivia of measuring out the soap flakes, waiting for the plumber. High time to move to his father’s side. But his father lay on his back in the bedroom, cursing steadily. “What the hell is the matter with this TV? Why bother buying a Sony if there’s no one who will fix it?”

“I’ll find us a repairman today,” Ruth’s new, soft voice floated out.

Ruth wore dresses all the time now because Cody said he was tired of her pantsuits. “Everlasting polyester pantsuits,” he said, and it was true she didn’t look as stylish as most other women, though Luke wasn’t so sure that the pantsuits were to blame. Even after she changed to dresses, something seemed to be wrong. They were too big, or too hard-surfaced, or too shiny; they looked less like clothes than … housing, Luke thought. “Is this better?” she asked his father, and she stood hopefully in the doorway, flat on her penny loafers because in Garrett County, she said, they had never learned her to walk in high heels. By then, Cody had recovered from his mood. He said, “Sure, honey. Sure. It’s fine.” He wasn’t always evil tempered. It was the strain of lying immobile. It was the constant discomfort. He did make an effort. But then, not two hours later: “Ruth, will you explain why I have to live in a place that looks like a candy dish? Is it necessary to rent a house where everything is white and gold and curlicued? You think of that as class?”

It was the nature of Cody’s job that he worked alone. As soon as he finished streamlining whatever factory had called him in, he moved on. His partner, a man named Sloan, lived in New York City and invented the devices that Cody determined a need for — sorting racks, folding aids, single hand tools combining the tasks of several. Consequently, there were no fellow workers to pay Cody visits, unless you counted that one edgy call by the owner of the factory where he’d had his accident. And they didn’t know any of the neighbors. They were on their own, just the three of them. They might have been castaways. No wonder Cody acted so irritable. The only time Luke and his mother got out was once a week, when they went for groceries. Backing her white Mercedes from the garage, Ruth sat erect and alert, not looking behind her, already anxious about Cody. “Maybe I should’ve made you stay. If he needs to go to the bathroom—”

“He can good and wait,” Luke said through his teeth.

“Why, Luke!”

“Let him pee in the bed.”

“Luke Tull!”

Luke stared out the window.

“It’s been hard on you,” his mother said. “We’ve got to find you some friends.”

“I don’t need friends.”

“Everybody needs friends. We don’t have a one, in this town. I feel like I’m drying up. Sometimes I wonder,” she said, “if this life is really …” But she didn’t say any more.

When they returned, Cody was pleasant and cheerful, as if he’d made some resolutions in their absence. Or maybe he’d been refreshed by the solitude. “Talked to Sloan,” he told Ruth. “He called from New York. I said to him, soon as I get this cast off I’m going to finish up at the factory and clear on out. I can’t take much more of this place.”

“Oh, good, Cody, honey.”

“Bring me my briefcase, will you? I want to jot down some ideas. There’s lots I could be doing in bed.”

“I picked out some of those pears you like.”

“No, no, just my briefcase, and that pen on the desk in my study. I’m going to see if my fingers are up to writing yet.”

He told Luke, “Work is what I need. I’ve been starved for work. It’s made me a little snappish.”

Luke scratched his rib cage. He said, “That’s all right.”

“You make sure you get a job you enjoy, once you’re grown. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. That’s important.”

“I know.”

“Me, I deal with time,” said Cody. He accepted a ball-point pen from Ruth. “Time is my favorite thing of all.”

Luke loved it when his father talked about time.

“Time is my obsession: not to waste it, not to lose it. It’s like … I don’t know, an object, to me; something you can almost take hold of. If I could just collect enough of it in one clump, I always think. If I could pass it back and forth and sideways, you know? If only Einstein were right and time were a kind of river you could choose to step into at any place along the shore.”

He clicked his pen point in and out, frowning into space. “If they had a time machine, I’d go on it,” he said. “It wouldn’t much matter to me where. Past or future: just out of my time. Just someplace else.”

Luke felt a pang. “But then you wouldn’t know me,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Sure he would,” Ruth said briskly. She was opening the latches of Cody’s briefcase. “He’d take you with him. Only mind,” she told Cody, “if Luke goes too you’ve got to bring penicillin, and his hay fever pills, and his fluoride toothpaste, you hear?”

Cody laughed, but he didn’t say one way or another about taking Luke along.

That was the evening that Cody first got his strange notion. It came about so suddenly: they were playing Monopoly on Cody’s bed, the three of them, and Cody was winning as usual and offering Luke a loan to keep going. “Oh, well, no, I guess I’ve lost,” said Luke.

There was the briefest pause — a skipped beat. Cody looked over at Ruth, who was counting her deed cards. “He sounds just like Ezra,” he told her.

She frowned at Baltic Avenue.

“Didn’t you hear what he said? He said it just like Ezra.”

“Really?”

“Ezra would do that,” Cody told Luke. “Your Uncle Ezra. It was no fun beating him at all. He’d never take a loan and he wouldn’t mortgage the least little thing, not even a railroad or the waterworks. He’d just cave right in and give up.”

“Well, it’s only that … you can see that I’ve lost,” Luke said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Sometimes it’s more like you’re Ezra’s child, not mine.”

“Cody Tull! What a thought,” said Ruth.

But it was too late. The words hung in the air. Luke felt miserable; he had all he could do to finish the game. (He knew his father had never thought much of Ezra.) And Cody, though he dropped the subject, remained dissatisfied in some way. “Sit up straighter,” he kept telling Luke. “Don’t hunch. Sit straight. God. You look like a rabbit.”

As soon as he could, Luke said good night and went off to bed.

The following morning, everything was fine again. Cody did some more work on his papers and had another talk with Sloan. Ruth cooked a chicken for a nice cold summer supper. Anytime Luke wandered by, Cody said something cheerful to him. “Why so long in the face?” he’d ask, or, “Feeling bored, son?” It sounded funny, calling Luke “son.” Cody didn’t usually do that.

They all had lunch in the bedroom — sandwiches and potato salad, like a picnic. The telephone, buried among the sheets, started ringing halfway through the meal, and Cody said not to answer it. It was bound to be his mother, he said. They kept perfectly silent, as if the caller could somehow hear them. After the ringing stopped, though, Ruth said, “That poor, poor woman.”

“Poor!” Cody snorted.

“Aren’t we awful?”

“You wouldn’t call her poor if you knew her better.”

Luke went back to his room and sorted through his old model airplanes. His parents’ voices drifted after him. “Listen,” Cody was telling Ruth. “This really happened. For my mother’s birthday I saved up all my money, fourteen dollars. And Ezra didn’t have a penny, see …”

Luke scrabbled through his wooden footlocker, the one piece of furniture that really belonged to him. It had accompanied all their moves since before he could remember. He was hunting the missing wing of a jet. He didn’t find the wing but he did find a leather bag of marbles — the kind he used to like, with spritzy bubbles like ginger ale inside them. And a slingshot made from a strip of inner tube. And a tonette — a dusty black plastic whistle on which, for Mother’s Day back in first grade, he’d played “White Coral Bells” along with his classmates. He tried it now: White coral bells, upon a slender stalk … It returned to him, note by note. He rose and went to his parents’ room to play it through to the end. Lilies of the valley deck my—

His father said, “I can’t stand it.”

Luke lowered the tonette.

“Are you doing this on purpose?” Cody asked. “Are you determined to torment me?”

“Huh?”

“Cody, honey …” Ruth said.

“You’re haunting me, isn’t that it? I can’t get away from him! I spend half my life with meek-and-mild Ezra and his blasted wooden whistle; I make my escape at last, and now look: here we go again. It’s like a conspiracy! Like some kind of plot where someone decided, long before I was born, I would live out my days surrounded by people who were … nicer than I am, just naturally nicer without even having to try, people that other people preferred; and everywhere I go there’s something, just that goddamn forgiving smile or some demented folk song floating out a window—”

“Cody, Luke will be thinking you have lost your senses,” Ruth said.

“And you!” Cody told her. “Look at you! Ah, Lord,” he said. “Some people fit together forever, don’t they? And you haven’t a hope in heaven of prying them apart. Married or not, you’ve always loved Ezra better than me.”

“Cody, what are you talking about?”

“Admit it,” Cody said. “Isn’t Ezra the real, true father of Luke?”

There was a silence.

“You didn’t say that. You couldn’t have,” Ruth told him.

“Admit it!”

“You know you don’t seriously believe such a thing.”

“Isn’t it the truth? Tell me! I won’t get angry, I promise.”

Luke went back to his room and closed the door.

All that afternoon he lay on his bed, rereading an old horse book from his childhood because he didn’t have anything else to do. The story struck him as foolish now, although once he’d loved it. When his mother called him for supper, he walked very firmly into the kitchen. He was going to refuse, absolutely, to eat in the bedroom with Cody any more. But his mother had already set two places at the kitchen table. She sat across from him while he ate, not eating much herself. Luke shoveled in various cold foods and refused to meet her eyes. The fact was that she was stupid. He didn’t know when he’d seen such a weak and stupid woman.

After supper he went back to his room and listened to a radio show where people called up a tired-sounding host and offered their opinions. They discussed drunken drivers and battered wives. It grew dark, but Luke didn’t turn on the light. His mother tapped hesitantly on his door, paused, and left.

Then he must have fallen asleep. When he woke it was darker than ever, and his neck was stiff, and a woman on the radio was saying, “Now, I’m not denying I signed the papers but that was only his fast talk, only him talking me into it. ‘Just put your John Doe right here,’ he tells me …”

“I assume you mean John Hancock,” the host said wearily.

“Whatever,” said the woman.

Then beneath these voices, murmuring through the wall, came Cody’s grumble and Ruth’s pale answers. Luke covered his head with his pillow.

He tried to recall his Uncle Ezra. It was several years since they’d met. And even that was such a brief visit, his father taking them away in a huff before they’d got well settled. Finding Ezra was something like hunting through that footlocker; he had to burrow past a dozen other memories, and more came trailing up along with what he was after. He smelled the burned toast in his grandma’s kitchen and remembered Ezra’s bedroom, which had once been Ezra’s and Cody’s together, where boyhood treasures (a football-shaped bookend, a peeling hockey stick) had sat in their places so long that to Ezra, they were invisible. Anything that caught Luke’s attention, Ezra had seemed surprised to see. “Oh! Would you like to have that?” he would ask, and when Luke politely declined, not wanting to seem greedy, Ezra said, “Please. I can’t think what it’s still doing here.” His room had been large — a sort of dormitory arrangement, occupying the whole third floor — but its stuffy smell of used sheets and twice-worn clothes had made it seem smaller. There was a lock inside the bathroom door downstairs, Luke recalled, that looked exactly like a little silver cashew; and the bathroom itself was tall and echoing, ancient, cold floored, with a porcelain knob in the tub reading WASTE.

He tried to picture his cousins — Aunt Jenny’s children — but only came up with another room: his cousin Becky’s ruffled bedroom, with its throng of shabby stuffed animals densely encircling her bed. How could she sleep? he had wondered. But she told him she had no trouble sleeping at all; and whenever she went away to spend the night, she said, she took the whole menagerie in a giant canvas suitcase and set it out first thing around the new bed, even before unpacking her pajamas; and most of her friends did the same. It was Luke’s first inkling that girls were different. He was mystified and charmed, and he treated her protectively for the rest of that short visit — though she was a year older than he and half a head taller.

If Ezra were really his father, Luke thought, then Luke could live in Baltimore where houses were dark and deep and secretive. Relatives would surround him — a loving grandma, funny Aunt Jenny, those rafts of cousins. Ezra would let him help out in his restaurant. He would talk about food and how people need to be fed with care; Luke could hear his ambling way of speaking. Yes, now he had it: the memory homed in. Ezra wore a flannel shirt of soft blue plaid, washed into oblivion. His hair was yellow … why! It was Luke’s kind of yellow, all streaky and layered. And his eyes were Luke’s kind of gray, a full shade lighter than Cody’s, and his skin had that same golden cast that caused it to blend into his hair almost without demarcation.

Luke let himself believe in some unimaginable moment between Ruth and Ezra, fourteen years ago. He skipped across it quickly to the time when Ezra would arrive to claim him. “You’re old enough to be told now, son …”

Knitting this scene in the dark, doubling back to correct a false note or racing forward to a good part, Luke forgot himself and took the pillow off his head. Instantly, he heard Cody’s voice behind the wall. “Everything I’ve ever wanted, Ezra got it. Anything in life I wanted. Even things I thought I had won, Ezra won in the end. And he didn’t even seem to be trying; that’s the hell of it.”

“You won the damn Monopoly games, didn’t you?” Luke shouted.

Cody said nothing.

The next morning, Cody seemed unusually quiet. Ruth took him into the doctor’s to get his walking cast — a moment they’d been waiting for, but Cody didn’t act interested now. Luke had to go along to serve as a crutch. He flinched when Cody first laid his heavy arm cast across his shoulders; he felt there was some danger hovering. But Cody was a dead weight, grunting as he walked, evidently thinking about other matters. He heaved himself into the car and stared bleakly ahead of him. In the doctor’s waiting room, while Luke and his mother read magazines, Cody just sat empty faced. And after he got his walking cast, he hobbled back to the car unassisted, ignoring Luke’s offer of help. He fell into bed as soon as they reached home and lay gazing at the ceiling. “Cody, honey? Remember the doctor said to give that leg some exercise,” Ruth told him.

He didn’t answer.

Luke went out to the yard and kicked at the grass a while as if he were hunting for something. Next door, a cluster of toddlers in their wading pool stared at him. He wanted to shout, “Turn away! Stop looking at me; you have no business.” But instead it was he who turned, wandering out of the yard and down the street. More wading pools; more round-eyed, judging stares. A Welsh corgi, squat and dignified, bustled down the sidewalk, followed by a lady in a flowing caftan. “Toulouse! Toulouse!” she called. The heat was throbbing; it almost breathed. Luke’s face became filmed with sweat and his T-shirt stuck to his back. He kept wiping his upper lip. He passed rows of colonial houses similar to his, each with some object featured like a museum piece in the living-room window: a bulbous lamp, a china horse, a vase of stiff-necked marigolds. (And what did his own window have? He couldn’t recall. He wanted to say a weeping fig tree, but that was from an apartment they’d rented, three or four towns back.) Sprinklers spun lazily. It was a satisfaction to stop, from time to time, and watch a lawn soak up the spangled water drops.

Now here came some busy lady with her baby in a stroller, small children all around her. He crossed the street to avoid them, took a right turn, and arrived on Willow Bough Avenue with its whizzing traffic, discount drugstores, real estate offices and billboards and service stations. He waited at an intersection, pondering where to go next. One of the things about moving so often was, he never really knew where he was. He believed his sense of direction had been blunted. He couldn’t understand how some people seemed to carry a kind of detailed, internal map of the town they lived in.

A Trailways bus zipped past him reading BALTIMORE. Imagine hailing it. (Could you hail a Trailways bus?) Imagine boarding it — assuming he had the money, which he didn’t — and riding off to Baltimore, arriving at Ezra’s restaurant and strolling in. “Here I am.” “There you are,” Ezra would say. Oh, if only he’d brought his money! Another bus passed, but that was a local. Then a gigantic truck drew up, braking for an amber light. Luke, as if obeying orders, stuck out a thumb. The driver leaned across the seat and opened the door on the passenger side. “Hop on in,” he told Luke.

No RIDERS, a label on the window read. None of this was happening. Slowly, like someone being pushed from behind, Luke climbed into the cab. It was filled with loud music and a leathery, sweaty, masculine smell that made him feel instantly comfortable. He slammed the door and settled back. The driver — a knife-faced man, unshaven — squinted up at the traffic light and asked, “Whereabouts you headed, son?”

Luke said, “Baltimore, Maryland.”

“Folks know you’re going?”

“Sure,” said Luke.

The driver shot him a glance.

“Why, my folks … live in Baltimore,” Luke told him.

“Oh, then.”

The truck started up again. They rumbled past the shopping mall where Luke’s mother went for groceries. A green sign swung overhead, listing points north. “Well,” said the driver, adjusting his mirror, “I tell you: I can carry you as far as Richmond. That’s where I have to veer west.”

“Okay,” said Luke.

Even Richmond, after all, was farther than he’d ever meant to go.

On the radio, Billy Swan was singing “I Can Help.” The driver hummed along in a creaky voice that never quite hit the right note. His thin gray hair, Luke saw, had recently been combed; it lay close to his skull in damp parallel lines. He held a cigarette between his fingers but he didn’t light it. His fingernails were so thick and ridged, they might have been cut from yellow corduroy.

“In the summer of fifty-six,” he said, “I was passing along this very road with my wife in a Safeway grocery truck when she commences to go into labor. Not but eight months gone and she proceeds directly into labor. Lord God! I recall to this day. She says, ‘Clement, I think it’s my time.’ Well, I was young then. Inexperienced. I thought a baby came one-two-three. I thought we didn’t have a moment to spare. And also, you know what they say: a seven-month baby will turn out good but an eight-month baby won’t make it. I can’t figure why that should be. So anyhow, I put on the brakes. I’m shaking all over. My brake foot is so shaky we’re just wobbling down the highway. You see that sign over there? Leading off to the right? See that hospital sign? Well, that is where I taken her. Straight up that there road. I never come by here but what I recall it.”

Luke looked politely at the hospital sign, and then swiveled his neck to go on looking after they had passed. It was the only response he could think of.

“Labor lasted thirty-two hours,” the driver said. “Safeway thought I’d hijacked their rig.”

“Well,” said Luke, “but the baby got born okay.”

“Sure,” the driver told him. “Five-pound girl. Lisa Michelle.” He thought a moment. Then he said, “She died later on, though.”

Luke cleared his throat.

“Crib death is what they call it nowadays,” said the driver. He swerved around a trailer. “Ever hear of it?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“Sudden crib death. Six months old. Light of my life. Bright as a button, too — loved me to bits. I’d come home and she would just rev right up — wheel her arms and legs like a windmill soon as she set eyes on me. Then she went and died.”

“Well, gosh,” said Luke.

“Now I got others,” the driver said. “Want to see them? Turn down that sun visor over your head.”

Luke turned down the visor. A color photo, held in place by a pink plastic clothespin, showed three plain girls in dresses so new and starchy that it must have been Easter Sunday.

“The youngest is near about your age,” the driver said. “What are you: thirteen, fourteen?” He honked at a station wagon that had cut too close in front. “They’re nice girls,” he said, “but I don’t know. It’s not the same, somehow. Seems like I lost the … attachment. Lost the knack of getting attached. I mean, I like them; shoot, I love them, but I just don’t have the … seems to me I can’t get up the energy no more.”

A lady on the radio was advertising Chevrolets. The driver switched stations and Barbra Streisand came on, showing off as usual. “But you ought to see my wife!” the driver said. “Isn’t it amazing? She loves those kids like the very first one. She just started in all over. I don’t know what to make of her. I look at her and I can’t believe it. ‘Dotty,’ I say, ‘really it all comes down to nothing. It’s not for anything,’ I say. ‘Dotty, how come you can go on like this?’ See, me, I never bounced back so good. I pass that hospital road and you know? I halfway believe if I made the turnoff, things would be just like before. Dotty’d be holding my hand, and Lisa Michelle would be waiting to be born.”

Luke rubbed his palms on his jeans. The driver said, “Well, now. Listen to me! Just gabbing along; I guess you think I talk too much.” And for the rest of the trip he was quiet, only whistling through his teeth when the radio played a familiar song.

He said goodbye near Richmond, going out of his way to leave Luke at a ramp just past a rest center. “You wait right here and you’ll get a ride in no time,” he said. “Here they’re traveling slow anyhow, and won’t mind stopping.” Then he raised his hand stiffly and drove off. From a distance, his truck looked as bright and chunky as a toy.

But it seemed he took some purpose with him, some atmosphere of speed and assurance. All at once … what was Luke doing here? What could he be thinking of? He saw himself, alone in the fierce white glare of the sun, cocking his thumb at an amateurish angle on a road in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t even visualize how far he had to go. (He’d never done well in geography.) Although it was hot — the peak of the afternoon, by now — he wished for a windbreaker: protection. He wished for his billfold, not so much for the small amount of money it held as for the i.d. card that had come with it when he bought it. If he were killed on this road, how would they know whom to notify? He wondered if — homeless, parentless — he would have to wear these braces on his teeth for the rest of his life. He pictured himself as an old man, still hiding a mouthful of metal whenever he smiled.

Then an out-of-date, fin-tailed car stopped next to him and the door swung open. “Need a lift?” the driver asked. In the back, a little tow-headed boy bounced up and down, calling, “Come on! Come on! Get in and have a ride. Come on in and ride with us!”

Luke got in. He found the driver smiling at him — a suntanned man in blue jeans, with deep lines around his eyes. “My name’s Dan Smollett,” he said. “That’s Sammy in the back seat.”

“I’m Luke.”

“We’re heading toward D.C. That do you any good?”

“It’s fine,” said Luke. “I guess,” he added, still unsure of his geography. “I’m on my way to Baltimore.”

“Baltimore!” said Sammy, still bouncing. “Daddy, can we go to Baltimore?”

“We have to go to Washington, Sammy.”

“Don’t we know someone in Baltimore too? Kitty? Susie? Betsy?”

“Now, Sammy, settle down, please.”

“We’re looking up Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy told Luke.

“Oh,” said Luke.

“We just came from Raleigh and saw Carla.”

“No, no, Carla was in Durham,” his father told him. “It was DeeDee you saw in Raleigh.”

“Carla was nice,” said Sammy. “She was the best of the bunch. You would’ve liked her, Luke.”

“I would?”

“It’s too bad she was married.”

“Sammy, Luke doesn’t want to hear about our private lives.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Luke. He wasn’t sure what he was hearing, anyhow.

They were back on the freeway by now, staying in the slow lane — perhaps because of the grinding noise that came whenever Dan accelerated. Luke had never been in a car as old as this one. Its interior was a dusty gray felt, the floors awash in paper cups and Frito bags. The glove compartment — doorless — spilled out maps that were splitting at the seams, along with loose change, Lifesavers, and miniature tractors and dump trucks. In the rear, Sammy bounced among blankets and grayish pillows. “Settle down,” his father kept saying, but it didn’t do any good. “He gets a little restless, along about afternoon,” Dan told Luke.

“How long have you been traveling?” Luke asked.

“Oh, three weeks or so.”

“Three weeks!”

“We left just after summer school. I’m a high school English teacher; I had to teach this grammar course first.”

“Lookit here,” Sammy said, and on his next bounce upward he thrust a wad of paper into Luke’s face. Evidently, someone had been chewing on it. It was four sheets, mangled together, bearing typed columns of names and addresses. “Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy said.

Luke stared.

“They are not,” said his father. “Really, Sammy.” He told Luke, “That’s my graduating class in high school. Boys and girls. Last year they had a reunion; I didn’t go but they sent us this address list.”

“Now we’re looking up the girls,” Sammy said.

“Not all the girls, Sammy.”

“The girls that you went out with.”

“My wife is divorcing me,” Dan told Luke. He seemed to think this explained everything. He faced forward again, and Luke said, “Oh.” Another rest center floated by, a distant forest of Texaco and Amoco signs. A moving van honked obligingly when Sammy gave the signal out the window. Sammy squealed and bounced all the harder — a spiky mass of bones and striped T-shirt, flapping shorts, torn sneakers.

“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.”

“There is! Believe me,” he said. “But it’s new. They just did buy it, and I haven’t been there yet.”

“Look it up,” she told him.

She stopped so suddenly, he was glad he’d fastened his seat belt. A telephone booth stood beside them. “Go on! Look it up,” she told him. She must have thought she was calling his bluff.

Luke said, “All right, I will.”

Then in the phone booth — the old, fully enclosed kind, a glass and aluminum boxful of heat — he ran a finger past Homeland Racquet Club, Homeseekers Realty, and found himself so surprised by Homesick Restaurant that it might have been a bluff after all. “It’s on St. Paul Street,” he said when he came back to the car. “You can drop me off anywhere; I’ll find the number.”

But no, she had to take him to the doorstep, though it meant a good deal of doubling back because St. Paul, it turned out, was one-way and she kept miscalculating the cross streets. When she parked in front of the restaurant, she said, “Well, I’ll be! It exists.”

“Thank you for the ride,” Luke said.

She peered at him. “Are you going to be all right, Luke?” she asked.

“Of course I am.”

“And you’re certain your parents are here.”

“Of course they are.”

But she waited, anyhow. (It reminded him of the grade-school parties given by his classmates — his mother making sure he got in before she drove away.) He tried the restaurant’s door and found it locked. He would have to go around to the rear. The woman leaned out her window and called, “What’s the trouble, Luke?”

“I forgot, I have to use the kitchen entrance.”

“What if that’s locked, too?”

“It isn’t.”

“You listen, Luke,” she called to him. “Everything is changing; things aren’t safe like in the old days. Every alley in this city is full of muggers, are you hearing what I say? Every doorway and vacant building, Luke, every street in Baltimore.”

He waved and disappeared. A moment later he heard her car take off again — but reluctantly, without its usual verve, as if she were still absorbed in her catalogue of dangers.

He knew the restaurant so well, he must have carried its image constantly within him: its clatter of pans and crash of china, smell of cut celery simmering in butter, broom-shaped bundles of herbs dangling from the rafters, gallon jars of wrinkly Greek olives, bushel baskets of parsley, steaming black kettles watched devotedly by a boy no older than Luke. Beyond the kitchen, hardly separate from it, stretched the dining room with its white-draped tables and dusty sunbeams. There were so many decorations in the dining room — gifts and mementos, accumulated over the years — that Luke was always reminded of someone’s home, one of those teeming family houses where kindergarten drawings are taped above the mantel and then forgotten. He recognized the six-foot collage of Ezra’s hearts-of-palm salad, presented by an artist who often ate here, and he saw the colored paper chain that he and his cousins had festooned around a light fixture for some long-ago Christmas dinner. (Ezra had never taken it down, though the dinner had broken off in a quarrel and the chain was now brittle and faded.) Luke knew that in one corner, out of his line of vision, sat a heavy antique bicycle that Ezra had bought in a Timonium flea market. MERCURIO’S CULINARY DELICACIES was lettered importantly across its wooden basket, which was filled with frosty glass pears and bananas contributed by a customer. Astride the bicycle stood a cardboard Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up — the prank of unknown persons, but no one had ever removed her and Marilyn rode on, her neck creased nearly to the breaking point, her smile growing paler season by season and her accordion-pleated skirt curling at the edges.

Hot, flushed workers darted around the kitchen, intent on their private tasks, weaving between the others like those Model T’s in silent comedies—zip!, just missing, never once colliding, their paths crisscrossing but miraculously slipping past disaster. Luke stood in the doorway unnoticed. His trip had been such a process in itself; he had almost lost sight of his purpose. What was he doing here, anyhow? But then he saw Ezra. Ezra was piling biscuits in a crude rush basket. He wore not the blue plaid shirt that Luke remembered — which was flannel, after all, unsuitable for summer — but a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He thoughtfully set each biscuit in its place, his large, blunt hands deliberate. Luke made his way across the kitchen. He was surprised by a flash of shyness. His heart was beating too fast. He arrived in front of Ezra and said, “Hi.”

Ezra looked up, still thoughtful. “Hi,” he said.

He didn’t know who this was.

Luke was stricken, at first. Then he began to feel pleased. Why, he must have changed immeasurably! He’d shot up a foot; his voice was getting croaky; he was practically a man. And there was some safety, a kind of shield, in Ezra’s flat gaze. Luke rearranged his plans. He squared his shoulders. “I’d like a job,” he said firmly.

Ezra grew still. “Luke?” he said.

“If that boy over there can tend the kettles—” Luke was saying. He stopped. “Pardon?”

“It’s Cody’s Luke. Isn’t it.”

“How’d you guess?”

“I could tell when you did your shoulders that way, just like your dad, just exactly like your dad. How funny! And something about the tone of your voice, all set to do battle … well, Luke!” He shook Luke’s hand very hard. His fingers had a sandy feel from the biscuits. “Where are your parents? Back at the house?”

“I’m here on my own.”

“On your own?” Ezra said. He was smiling genially, uncertainly, like someone hoping to understand a joke. “You mean, with nobody else?”

“I wanted to ask if I could stay with you.”

Ezra stopped smiling. “It’s Cody,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Something’s happened to him.”

“Nothing’s happened.”

“I should have gone down; I knew I should. I shouldn’t have let him stop me. The accident was worse than they let on.”

“No! He’s fine.”

Ezra surveyed him for a long, silent moment.

“He’s already got his walking cast,” Luke told him.

“Yes, but his other wounds, his head?”

“Everything’s okay.”

“You swear it?”

“Yes! Gosh.”

“See, I don’t have any other brothers,” Ezra said.

“I swear. I cross my heart,” said Luke.

“Then where is he?”

“He’s in Virginia,” said Luke. “I left him there. I ran away.”

Ezra thought this over. A waitress sidled past him with a tray of delicately clinking, trembling glasses.

“I didn’t plan to,” Luke told him. “But he said to me … see, he said …”

Oh, there was no point in telling Ezra what Cody had said. It was nonsense, one of those remarks that pop up out of nowhere. And here was Luke, much too far from home, faltering under his uncle’s kindly gaze. “I can’t explain,” he said.

But just as if he had explained, Ezra said, gently, “You mustn’t take it to heart. He didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.”

“I know that,” Luke said.

On the telephone with Ruth, Ezra was jocular and brotherly, elaborately casual, playing down what had happened. “Now, Ruth, I’m sitting here looking straight at him and he’s perfectly all right … police? What for? Well, call them back, tell them he’s safe and sound. A lot of fuss over nothing, tell them.”

Luke listened, smiling anxiously as if his mother could see him. He laced the spirals of the telephone cord between his fingers. They were in Ezra’s little office behind the kitchen. Ezra sat at a desk piled with cookbooks, bills, magazines, a pot of chives, a copper pan with a cracked enamel lining, and a framed news photo of two men in aprons holding an entire long fish on a platter.

Then evidently, Cody took over the phone. Ezra sounded more serious now. “We could maybe keep him a while,” he said. “We’d like to have him visit. I hope you’ll let him.” In the directness and soberness of his tone, even in his short sentences, Luke read a kind of caution. He worried that Cody was shouting on the other end of the line; he dropped the cord and wandered away, pretending to be interested in the books in Ezra’s bookcase. He felt embarrassed for his father. But there must not have been any shouting after all; for Ezra said serenely, “All right, Cody. Yes, I can understand that.”

When he’d hung up, he told Luke, “They’ll be here as soon as possible. He’d rather come get you now, he said.”

Luke felt a little notch of dread beginning in his stomach. He wondered how angry his father was. He wondered how he could have thought of doing this — coming all this distance! So alone! It seemed like something he had floated through in a dream.

His grandmother’s house still had its burned-toast smell, its dusky corners, its atmosphere of secrecy. If you moved in here, Luke thought, wouldn’t you go on finding unexpected cubbyholes and closets for weeks or even months afterward? (Yes, imagine moving in. Imagine sharing the cozy living room, Grandma’s peaceful kitchen.) His grandmother skittered around him, adding tiny dishes of food to what was already on the table. Ezra kept telling her, “Mother, take it easy. Don’t fuss so.” But Luke enjoyed the fuss. He liked the way she would stop in the midst of preparing something to come running over and cup his face. “Look at you! Just look!” She was shorter than he was, now. And she had aged a great deal, or else he’d been too young before to notice. There was something scratchy and flyaway about her little screwed-tight topknot, once blond but now colorless, and her face sectioned deeply by pockets of lines and her wrinkled, spotted hands. He saw how much she loved him, purely from her hungry touch on his cheeks, and he wondered how his father could have misjudged her so.

“It’s not right that your parents just come and take you back,” she told him. “We’ll make them stay. We’ll just make them. I’ll change the sheets in Jenny’s old room. You can have the guest room. Oh, Luke! I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was you if I’d seen you on the street; it’s been that long. Though I would have said … yes, I would have thought to myself as I passed, ‘My, that child reminds me of my Cody years ago; doesn’t he? Just fairer haired, is all.’ I would have had this little pang and then forgotten, and then later maybe, making tea at home, I’d think, ‘Wait now, something was disturbing me back there …’ ”

She tried to pour a bowl of leftover green beans into a saucepan but missed, and slopped most of the liquid onto the counter, and swabbed it with wads of paper towels while laughing at herself. “What an old lady! What a silly old lady, you’re thinking. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. No, no, Ezra, I can manage, dear.”

“Mother, why don’t you let me take over?”

“I can certainly manage in my own kitchen, Ezra,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to go back to the restaurant? No telling what those people of yours are up to.”

“You just want to have Luke to yourself,” Ezra teased her.

“Oh, I admit it! I admit it!”

She turned on the flame beneath the saucepan. “Everything is coming together,” she told Luke. “I’ve been so worried, just sick with worry, picturing Cody in pain and longing to go to him, and of course he wouldn’t let me; he’s been like that ever since he was a baby, so … thorny, so bristly, just always has his back up. And now a little trouble or something — no, don’t look so uneasy! I won’t ask any questions, I promise; Ezra told me; it’s none of our business, but … a little trouble of some kind brings you here to us, I don’t know, maybe an argument? One of Cody’s tempers?”

“Mother,” said Ezra.

“And so,” she went on hastily, “we get to see him after all. He’s really going to show himself. But, Luke. Be truthful. He isn’t, he’s not … scarred or anything, is he? His face, I mean. He hasn’t got any disfiguring scars.”

“Just bruises,” said Luke. “Nothing that’ll last. In fact,” he added, “they’re mostly gone by now.”

It surprised him to find that he had held on to the picture of a broken Cody all this time, when really the bruises had faded, come to think of it, and the swellings had disappeared and the hair had almost completely grown over his head wound.

“He always was so handsome,” Pearl said. “It was part of his identity.”

Ezra moved around the table, setting out plates and silverware. The saucepan hissed on the stove. Luke sat down on a kitchen chair and tipped back against a radiator. Its sharply sculptured ribs and tall pipes made him think of old-fashioned, comforting places — a church he’d visited with a kindergarten friend, for instance, or his second-grade classroom, where once, when a snowstorm started during lunch hour, he had imagined a blizzard developing and keeping all the children snugly marooned for days, drinking cups of soup sent up from the cafeteria.

After supper, he and Pearl watched TV while Ezra went back to check the restaurant. Pearl kept the living room completely dark, lit only by the flickering blue TV screen. Both the front windows were open and they could hear the noises from the street — a game of prisoner’s base, a Good Humor bell, a woman calling her children. Around nine o’clock, when the twilight had finally given way to night and the stuffy air had cooled some, Luke caught the distinctive, tightly woven hum of a Mercedes drawing up to the curb. He tensed. Pearl, who wouldn’t have recognized the sound, went on placidly watching TV. “Who’s that, dear?” she asked him, but it was some actor she referred to; she was peering at the television set. There were footsteps across the porch. “Eh?” she said. “Already?” She rose, fumbling first for the arms of her chair in two or three blind passes. She opened the front door and said, “Cody?”

Cody stood looming, larger than Luke had expected, his arm and leg casts glowing whitely in the dark. “Hello, Mother,” he said.

“Why, Cody, let me look at you! And Ruth: hello, dear. Cody, are you all right? I can’t make out your face. Are you really feeling better?”

“I’m fine,” Cody told her. He kissed her cheek and then limped in.

“Hey, Dad,” Luke said, rising awkwardly.

Cody said, “May I ask what you thought you were up to?”

“Well, I don’t know …”

“Don’t know! Is that all you have to say? You scared the hell out of us! Your mother’s been beside herself.”

“Oh, honey, we were so worried!” Ruth cried. She pulled him close and kissed him. Her dress — a magenta polyester that she wore on special occasions — crumpled its sharp ruffles against his chest. He smelled her familiar, grassy smell that he’d never really noticed before.

“We near about lost our minds,” Ruth told Pearl. “I believe I must’ve aged a quarter-century. I felt if I looked out that same front window one more time I’d go mad, go stark, raving mad — same old curve in the road, same old sidewalk, empty. You just don’t know.”

“I do know. I do know,” said Pearl.

She was feeling for the switch to a lamp that sat on a table. The silk shade rustled and tilted. Then Ezra arrived in the door. “Cody?” he said. “Is that you?” He strode in fast and first encountered Ruth — almost ran her down — and seized her hand and pumped it. “Good to see you, Ruth,” he said. Meanwhile, Cody found the switch for his mother and turned the lamp on. It was coincidental; he was only being helpful, but Luke felt he’d turned on the lamp to examine them: Ruth and Ezra, face to face. Ezra blinked in the sudden light and then gave Cody a bear hug. Cody stood unresisting. “How’s your arm? How’s your leg?” Ezra asked. “What, no crutches?”

Cody went on studying Ruth and Ezra. “He says he can’t use them,” said Ruth. “He says with his opposite arm in a cast …” She reached out and smoothed Luke’s T-shirt, which didn’t need smoothing. She pushed his hair off his forehead. “And now that he’s got this walking cast …” she said absently. “Oh, Luke, sweetheart, didn’t you think you’d be missed?”

Cody turned away and sank into an armchair. “Would you two like some iced tea?” Pearl asked.

“No, thanks,” said Cody.

“Or coffee? A nice cup of coffee?”

“No! God. Nothing,” said Cody.

Luke expected Pearl to look hurt, but she only gave Cody a curiously satisfied smile. “You always were a grump when you weren’t feeling well,” she told him.

In fact, how surprising this whole visit was! — low-keyed and uneventful, even boring. Luke started out sitting rigidly erect, but gradually he relaxed and let his attention drift to a variety show on TV. The grown-ups murmured around him without any emphasis, discussing money. Cody wanted Pearl to get a new furnace; he would pay for it, he said. Pearl said she had a little savings, but Cody kept insisting, as if there were something gratifying, something triumphant in buying a person a furnace. Oh, money, money, money. You’d think they could come up with some more interesting subject.

Luke pressed a lever in his armchair and found himself flung back, his feet raised suddenly on some sort of footrest. Now Pearl was asking where they would go after Petersburg, and Cody was saying he didn’t know; Sloan and he were hoping to take on this cosmetics firm down in … His reasonable tone of voice made Luke feel hoodwinked, betrayed. Why, all this time he’d been hearing such terrible tales! He’d been told of such ill will and bitterness! But Cody and Pearl conversed pleasantly, like any civilized adults. They discussed whether the North or the South was a better place to live. They had a mild, dull, uninvested sort of argument about it, till it emerged that Pearl was assuming Baltimore was North and Cody was assuming it was South. She asked if this new factory might be as dangerous as the last one. “Any place is dangerous,” said Cody, “if idiots are running it.”

“Cody, I worry so,” she told him. “If you knew how frantic I’ve been! Hearing my oldest, my firstborn son is in critical condition and I’m not allowed to come see him.”

“Critical condition! I’m walking around, aren’t I?”

“The walking wounded,” she said, and she threw her hands up. “Isn’t it ironic? I’d always thought disasters were … lower class. I would read these hard-luck stories in the paper: lady evicted when she’s trying to raise the seven children of her daughter who was shot to death in a bar, and one of the children’s retarded and another has to be taken for dialysis so many times per week by city bus, transferring twice … well, of course I feel sorry for such people but also, I don’t know, impatient, as if they’d brought it on themselves some way. There’s a limit, I want to tell them; only so much of life is luck. But now look: my eyesight’s poorly and my oldest son’s had a serious accident and his son’s run away from home for reasons we’re not told, and I haven’t seen my daughter in weeks because she’s all tied up with her little girl who’s got that disease, what’s it called, Anor Exia—”

“How’s Becky doing, anyhow?” Cody asked, and Luke had an image of Cody’s reaching into a wild snarl of strings and tugging on the one short piece that wasn’t all tangled with the others.

“No one knows,” Pearl said, rocking.

Ruth massaged her forehead, which had the strained, roughened look it always got after a difficult day. Ezra laughed at something on TV. Cody, who was watching the two of them, sighed sharply and turned back to his mother.

“We’d better be going,” he told her.

She straightened. “What?” she said. “You’re leaving?”

“We’ve got a long drive.”

“But that’s exactly why you’re staying!” she told him. “Rest tonight. Start fresh in the morning.”

“We can’t,” said Cody.

“Why can’t you?”

“We have to … ah, feed the dog.”

“I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“A Doberman.”

“But Dobermans are vicious!”

“That’s why we better hurry back and feed him,” Cody said. “Don’t want him eating up the neighbors.”

He reached out a hand toward Luke, and Luke clambered off the reclining chair to help him to his feet. When Cody’s fingers closed on his, Luke imagined some extra tightness — a secret handshake, a nudge at the joke they’d put over on Pearl. He kept his face deliberately expressionless.

“Listen, all,” Ezra said. “It isn’t long till Thanksgiving, you know.”

Everybody stared at him.

“Will you come back here for Thanksgiving? We could have a family dinner at the restaurant.”

“Oh, Ezra, no telling where we’ll be by then,” said Cody.

“What,” said Pearl. “You never heard of airplanes? Amtrak? Modern transportation?”

“We’ll talk about it when the time gets closer,” Cody said, patting her shoulder. “Ruth, you got everything? So long, Ezra, let me know how it’s going.”

There was a flurry of hugs and handshakes. Later, Luke wasn’t sure he’d said thank you to Ezra — though what did he want to thank him for, exactly? Something or other … They made their way down the sidewalk and into Cody’s car, which still had the stale, blank smell of air-conditioned air. Everyone called out parts of sentences, as if trying to give the impression that they had so much left to say to each other, there wasn’t room to fit it all in. “Now, you be sure to—” “It sure was good to—” “Tell Jenny we wish—” “And drive defensively, hear?”

They pulled away from the curb, waving through the window. Pearl and Ezra fell behind. Luke, sitting in back, faced forward and found his father at the wheel. Ruth was in the passenger seat. “Mom?” Luke said. “Don’t you think you ought to drive?”

“He insisted,” Ruth said. “He drove all the way here, too.” She turned and looked at Luke meaningfully, over the back of the seat. “He said he wanted it to be him that drove to get you.”

“Oh,” said Luke.

What was she waiting for? She went on looking at him for some time, but then gave up and turned away again. Trying his best, Luke sat forward to observe how Cody managed.

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t be all that hard,” he said, “except for shifting the gears.”

“Shifting’s easy,” Cody told him.

“Oh.”

“And luckily there’s no clutch.”

“No.”

They passed rows and rows of houses, many with their porches full of people rocking in the dark. They turned down a block where there were stoops instead of porches, white stoops set close to the street. On one of these a whole family perched, with a beer cooler and an oscillating fan and a baby in a mesh crib on the sidewalk. A TV sat on a car hood at the curb so if you happened by on foot, you’d have to cross between TV and audience, muttering, “Excuse me, please,” just as if you’d walked through someone’s living room. Luke gazed back at that family as long as they were in sight. They were replaced by a strip of bars and cafés, and then by an unlit alley.

“Isn’t it funny,” Luke told his father, “no one’s ever asked you to reorganize anything in Baltimore.”

“Very funny,” Cody said.

“We could live with Grandma then, couldn’t we?”

Cody said nothing.

They left the city for the expressway, entering a world of high, cold lights and a blue-black sky. Ruth slid slowly against the window. Her small head bobbed with every dip in the road.

“Mom’s asleep,” Luke said.

“She’s tired,” said Cody.

Perhaps he meant it as a reproach. Was this where the scolding started? Luke kept very quiet for a while. But what Cody said next was, “It wears her out, that house. Your grandma’s so difficult to deal with.”

“Grandma’s not difficult.”

“Not for you, maybe. For other people she is. For your mother. Grandma believes your mother is ‘scrappy.’ She told me that, once. Called her ‘scrappy and hoydenish.’ ” He laughed, recalling something, so that Luke started smiling expectantly. “One time,” Cody said, “—I bet you don’t remember this — your mother and I had this silly little spat and she packed you up and ran off to Ezra. Then as soon as she got to the station, she started thinking what life would be like with your grandma and she called and asked me to come drive her home.”

Luke’s smile faded. “Ran off to where?” he asked.

“To Ezra. But never mind, it was only one of those—”

“She didn’t run to Ezra. She was planning to go to her folks,” Luke said.

“What folks?” Cody asked him.

Luke didn’t know.

“She’s an orphan,” Cody said. “What folks?”

“Well, maybe—”

“She was planning to go to Ezra,” Cody said. “I can see it now! I can picture how they’d take up their marriage, right where ours left off. Oh, I believe I’ve always had the feeling it wasn’t my marriage, anyhow. It was someone else’s. It was theirs. Sometimes I seemed to enjoy it better when I imagined I was seeing it through someone else’s eyes.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Luke asked him.

“All I meant was—”

“What are you, crazy? How come you go on hanging on to these things, year after year after year?”

“Now, wait a minute, now …”

“Mom?” Luke shook her shoulder. “Mom! Wake up!”

Ruth’s head sagged over to the other side.

“Let her rest,” Cody said. “Goddammit, Luke—”

“Wake up, Mom!”

“Hmm,” said Ruth, not waking.

“Mom? I want to ask you. Mom? Remember when you packed me up and left Dad?”

“Mm.”

“Remember?”

“Yes,” she murmured, curling tighter.

“Where were we going to go, Mom?”

She raised her head, with her hair all frowsy, and gave him a blurry, dazed stare. “What?” she said. “Garrett County, where my uncle lives. Who wants to know?”

“Nobody. Go back to sleep,” Cody told her.

She went back to sleep. Cody rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

They sped through a corridor of light that was bounded on both sides by the deepest darkness. They met and passed solitary cars that disappeared in an instant. Luke’s eyelids drooped.

“What I mean to say,” Cody said. “What I drove all this way to say …”

But then he trailed off. And when he started speaking again, it was on a whole different subject: time. How time was underestimated. How time was so important and all. Luke felt relieved. He listened comfortably, lulled by his father’s words. “Everything,” his father said, “comes down to time in the end — to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? Even big things — even mourning a death: aren’t you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos — ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced … Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”

He didn’t seem to expect an answer, which was lucky. Luke was too sleepy to manage one. He felt heavy, weighted with other people’s stories. He imagined he was slipping or falling. He believed he was gliding away, streaming down a great, wide, light-filled river of time along with all the people he had met today. He let his head nod over, and he closed his eyes and slept.