Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

2 Teaching the Cat to Yawn

While Cody’s father nailed the target to the tree trunk, Cody tested the bow. He drew the string back, laid his cheek against it, and narrowed his eyes at the target. His father was pounding in tacks with his shoe; he hadn’t thought to bring a hammer. He looked like a fool, Cody thought. He owned no weekend clothes, as other fathers did, but had driven to this field in his strained-looking brown striped salesman suit, white starched shirt, and navy tie with multicolored squares and circles scattered randomly across it. The only way you could tell this was a Sunday was when he turned, having pounded in the final tack; he didn’t have his tie pulled up close to his collar. It hung loose and slightly crooked, like a drunkard’s tie. A cockscomb of hair, as black as Cody’s but wavy, stood up on his forehead.

“There!” he said, plodding back. He still carried the shoe. He walked lopsided, either smiling at Cody or squinting in the sunlight. It was nowhere near spring yet, but the air felt unseasonably warm and a pale sun poured heat like a liquid over Cody’s shoulders. Cody bent and pulled an arrow from a cardboard tube. He laid it against the string. “Wait, now, son,” his father said. “You want to do things right, now.”

Naturally, this would have to be an educational experience. There were bound to be lectures and criticisms attached. Cody sighed and lowered the bow. His father stooped to put his shoe on, squirming his foot in without undoing the laces, the way Cody’s mother hated. The heel of his black rayon sock was worn so thin it was translucent. Cody looked off in another direction. He was fourteen years old — too big to be dragged on family outings any more and definitely too big for bows and arrows, unless of course you’d just leave the equipment to him and his friends, alone, and let them horse around or have themselves a contest or shatter windowpanes and streetlights for the hell of it. How did his father come up with these ideas? This was turning out to be even less successful than most. Cody’s mother, who was not the slightest bit athletic, picked dried flowers beside a fence. His little sister buttoned her sweater with chapped and bluish hands. His brother, Ezra, eleven years old, chewed a straw and hummed. He was missing his whistle, no doubt — a bamboo pipe, with six finger holes, on which he played tunes almost ceaselessly. He’d smuggled it along but their father had made him leave it in the car.

At this moment, Cody’s two best friends were attending a movie: Air Force, with John Garfield and Faye Emerson. Cody would have given anything to be with them.

“Now, your left arm goes like this,” his father said, positioning him. “You want to keep your wrist from getting stung, you see. And stand up straight. It was archery gave us our notions of proper posture; says so in the instruction book. Used to be that people slouched around any old how, all except the archers. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

No, he didn’t know that. He stood like something made of clay while his father poked him here and prodded him there, molding him into shape. “In the olden days …” his father said.

Cody let go of the bowstring. Thwack. The arrow hit the edge of the target, more sidewise than endwise, bounced off harmlessly and fell among the tree roots. “Now! What’d you go and do that for?” his father asked him. “Did I tell you to shoot yet? Did I?”

“It slipped,” said Cody.

“Slipped!”

“And anyhow, it couldn’t have stuck in the target. Not with that hard fat tree trunk behind it.”

“It most certainly could have,” his father said. “Like always, you just had to jump on in. Impulsive. Had to have it your way. When are you going to start keeping a better rein on yourself?”

Cody’s father (who never kept any sort of rein on himself whatsoever, as Cody’s mother constantly reminded him) lunged off toward the target, muttering and grabbing fistfuls of weed heads which he then threw away. Seeds and dry hulls spangled the air around him. “Willful boy; never listens. Don’t know why I bother.”

Cody’s mother shaded her eyes and called, “Did he hit it?”

“No, he didn’t hit it. How could he; I wasn’t even through explaining.”

“People have been known to hit a target without a person explaining it beforehand,” Cody muttered.

“What say?”

“Let Ezra try,” Cody’s mother suggested.

His father picked up the arrow and jammed it into the bull’s-eye, dead center. “Want to tell me it can’t stick?” he asked Cody. He pointed to the arrow, which stayed firm. “Look at that: steel-tipped. Of course it sticks. And spongy bark on the tree. I chose that tree. Of course it sticks. You could have lodged it in easy.”

“Ha,” said Cody, kicking a clod of earth.

“What say, son?”

“Let Ezra try,” Pearl called again. “Beck? Let Ezra try.”

Ezra was her favorite, her pet. The entire family knew it. Ezra looked embarrassed and switched the straw to the other side of his mouth. Beck waded back to them. “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes,” he said.

“Ezra? See if you can hit it, honey,” Pearl called.

Beck’s glance at Cody might have been sympathy, or else disgust. He pulled another arrow from the cardboard tube. “All right, Ezra, come on and try,” he said. “Just don’t get carried away like Cody here did.”

Ezra came over, still nibbling his straw, and accepted the bow from Cody. Well, this would be a laugh. There was no one as clumsy as Ezra. When he took his stance he did it all wrong, he just looked all wrong, in some way you couldn’t put your finger on. His elbows jutted out, winglike; his floppy yellow hair feathered in his eyes. “Now, wait, now,” Beck kept saying. “What’s the trouble here?” He moved around realigning Ezra’s shoulders, adjusting his grip on the bow. Ezra stayed patient. In fact, he might have had his mind on something else altogether; it seemed his attention had been caught by a cloud formation over to the south. “Oh, well,” Beck said finally, giving up. “Let her fly, I guess, Ezra. Ezra?”

Ezra’s fingers loosened on the string. The arrow sped in a straight, swift path, no arc to it at all. As if guided by an invisible thread — or worse, by the purest and most natural luck — it split the length of the arrow that Beck had already jammed in and it landed at the center of the bull’s-eye, quivering. There was a sharp, caught silence. Then Beck said, “Will you look at that.”

“Why, Ezra,” Pearl said.

“Ezra,” their sister Jenny cried. “Ezra, look what you did! What you went and did to that arrow!”

Ezra took the straw from his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he told Beck. (He was so used to breaking things.)

“Sorry?” said Beck.

He seemed to be hunting the proper tone of voice. Then he found it. “Well, son,” he said, “this just goes to show that it pays to follow instructions. See there, Cody? See what happens? A bull’s-eye. I’ll be damned. If you’d listened close like Ezra did, and not gone off half-cocked …”

He was moving toward the target as he spoke, oaring through the weeds, and Jenny was running to get there first. Cody couldn’t take his turn at shooting, therefore, although he was itching to. He was absolutely obligated to split that second arrow as Ezra had split the first. It was unthinkable not to. What were the odds against it? He felt a springy twanging inside, as if he himself were the bowstring. He bent down and pulled a new arrow from the tube and fitted it to the bow. He drew and aimed at a clump of shrubbery, then at his father’s dusty blue Nash, and then at Ezra, who was already wandering off again dreamy as ever. Longingly, Cody focused on Ezra’s fair, ruffled head. “Zing. Wham. Aagh, you got me!” he said. Imagine the satisfaction. Ezra turned slowly and caught sight of him. “No!” he cried.

“Huh?”

Ezra ran toward him, flapping his arms like an idiot and stammering, “Stop, stop, stop! No! Stop!” Did he really think Cody would shoot him? Cody stared, keeping the bow drawn. Ezra took a flying leap with his arms outstretched like a lover. He caught Cody in a kind of bear hug and slammed him flat on his back. It knocked the wind out of Cody; all he could do was gasp beneath Ezra’s warm, bony weight. And meanwhile, what had happened to the arrow? It was minutes before he could struggle to a sitting position, elbowing Ezra off of him. He looked across the field and found his mother leaning on his father’s arm, hobbling in his direction with a perfect circle of blood gleaming on the shoulder of her blouse. “Pearl, my God. Oh, Pearl,” his father was saying. Cody turned and looked at Ezra, whose face was pale and shocked. “See there?” Cody asked him. “See what you’ve gone and done?”

“Did I do that?”

“Gone and done it to me again,” Cody said, and he staggered to his feet and walked away.

On a weekday when his father was out of town, his mother shopping for supper, his brother and sister doing homework in their rooms, Cody took his BB gun and shot a hole in the kitchen window. Then he slipped outdoors and poked a length of fishing line through the hole. From the kitchen, he pulled the line until the rusty wrench that he’d tied to the other end was flush against the outside of the glass. He held it there by anchoring the line beneath a begonia pot. When his mother returned from shopping, Cody was seated at the kitchen table coloring a map of Asia.

After their homework was finished, Jenny and Ezra went out back. Ezra had been showing Jenny, all week, how to hit a Softball. (It seemed her classmates chose her last whenever they had a game.) As soon as they had walked through, Cody rose and went to the window. He saw them take their places in the darkening yard, bounded on either side by the neighbors’ hedges. They were a comically short distance apart. Jenny stood closest to the house and held her bat straight up, gingerly, as if preparing to club to death some small animal. Ezra tossed her a gentle pitch. (He was no great player himself.) Jenny took a whizzing swing, missed, and retrieved the ball from among the trash cans beside the back door. She threw it in a overhand so stiff and deformed that Cody wondered why Ezra bothered. Ezra caught it and pitched again. As the ball arched toward the bat, Cody felt for the fishing line beneath the begonia pot. He gave a quick tug. The windowpane clattered inward, breaking in several pieces. Jenny spun around and stared. Ezra’s mouth dropped open. “What was that?” Pearl called from the dining room.

“Just Ezra breaking another window,” Cody told her.

One weekend their father didn’t come home, and he didn’t come the next weekend either, or the next. Or rather, one morning Cody woke up and saw that it had been a while since their father was around. He couldn’t say that he had noticed from the start. His mother offered no excuses. Cody, watchful as a spy, studied her furrowed, distracted expression and the way that her hands plucked at each other. It troubled him to realize that he couldn’t picture his father’s most recent time with them. Trying to find some scene that would explain Beck’s leaving, he could only come up with general scenes, blended from a dozen repetitions: meals shattered by quarrels, other meals disrupted when Ezra spilled his milk, drives in the country where his father lost the way and his mother snapped out pained and exasperated directions. He thought of once when the Nash’s radiator had erupted in steam and his father, looking helpless, had flung his suit coat over it. “Oh, honestly,” his mother had said. But that was way back; it was years ago, wasn’t it? Cody journeyed through the various cubbies and crannies of the house, hunting up the trappings of his father’s “phases” (as his mother called them). There were the badminton racquets, the butterfly net, the archery set, the camera with its unwieldy flashgun, and the shoe box full of foreign stamps still in their glassine envelopes. But it meant nothing that these objects remained behind. What was alarming was his father’s half of the bureau: an empty sock drawer, an empty underwear drawer. In the shirt drawer, one unused sports shirt, purchased by the three children for Beck’s last birthday, his forty-fourth. And a full assortment of pajamas; but then, he always slept in his underwear. In the wardrobe, just a hanger strung with ties — his oldest, dullest, most frayed and spotted ties — and a pair of shoes so ancient that the toes curled up.

Cody’s brother and sister were staggeringly unobservant. They flitted in and out of the house like birds — Ezra playing his whistle, Jenny singing parts of jump-rope songs. Cody had the impression that musical notes filled their heads to overflowing; they left no room for anything serious. Auntie Sue got dressed in blue, Jenny sang, put on shoes and rubbers too … Her plain, flat voice and heedlessly swinging braids somehow reassured him. After all, what could go so wrong, when she skipped past with her ragged rope? What could go so very wrong?

Then one Saturday she said, “I’m worried about Daddy.”

“Why? “Cody asked.

“Cody,” she said, in her elderly way, “you can see that he doesn’t come home any more. I think he’s left us.”

“Don’t be silly,” Cody told her.

She surveyed him for a moment, with a composure that made him uneasy, and when he didn’t say any more she turned and went out on the porch. He heard the glider creak as she settled into it. But she didn’t start singing. In fact, the house was unusually quiet. The only sound was his mother’s heels, clicking back and forth overhead as she put away the laundry. And Ezra wasn’t playing his whistle. Cody had no idea where Ezra was.

He went upstairs to his mother’s bedroom. She was folding a sheet. “What’re you doing?” he asked. She gave him a look. He settled in a ladder-backed chair to watch her work. She was wearing a housedress that he very much disliked, cream colored with deep red streaks across it like paintbrush strokes. The shoulders were shaped by triangular pads that unbuttoned and removed when it was time to wash the dress. Cody had often thought of stealing those pads. With her shoulders broadened, his mother looked powerful and sharp and scary. On her feet were open-toed shoes and short white socks. She traveled rapidly between the laundry basket and the bed, laying out stacks of clothing. There was no stack for his father.

“When is Dad coming home?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “pretty soon.”

She didn’t meet his eyes.

Cody looked around him and noticed, for the first time, that there was something pinched and starved about the way this house was decorated. Not a single perfume bottle or china figurine sat upon his mother’s bureau. No pictures hung on the walls. Even the bedside tables were completely bare; and in all the drawers in this room, he knew, every object would be aligned and squared precisely — the clothing organized by type and color, whites grading into pastels and then to darks; comb and brush parallel; gloves paired and folded like a row of clenched fists. Who wouldn’t leave such a place? He straightened, feeling panicky. His mother chose that moment to come over and smooth his hair down. “My,” she told him, smiling, “you’re getting so big! I can’t believe it.”

He shrank back in his seat.

“You’re getting big enough for me to start relying on,” she said.

“I’m only fourteen,” Cody told her.

He slipped off the chair and left the room. The bathroom door was closed; he heard the shower running and Ezra singing “Greensleeves.” He opened the door just a crack, snaked one arm in, and turned on the hot water in the sink. Then he traveled through the rest of the house, from kitchen to downstairs bathroom to basement, methodically opening every hot water faucet to its fullest. But you couldn’t really say his heart was in it.

“Tull?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this the Tull residence?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Darryl Peters,” the man said, showing a business card.

Cody took a swig of beer and accepted the card. While he was reading it, he sloshed the beer bottle absently to get a good head of suds. He was wearing dungarees and nothing else; it was a blistering day in August. The house, however, was fairly cool — the living room dim, the paper shades pulled all the way down and glowing yellow with the afternoon sun. Mr. Peters looked in wistfully, but remained on the porch with his hat in his hand. He was way overdressed, for August.

“So,” said Cody. He nudged the screen door open with his bare foot. Mr. Peters caught hold of it and stepped inside.

“Would your mother be in?” he asked.

“She’s taken a job.”

“Well, then, your … is Ezra Tull your father?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Brother. Ah.”

“He’s in.”

“Well, then,” Mr. Peters said.

“I’ll go get him.”

Cody went upstairs and into Jenny’s room. Jenny and Ezra were playing checkers on the floor. Ezra, wearing shorts and a sleeveless undershirt full of holes, stroked his cat, Alicia, and frowned at the board. “Someone to see you,” Cody told him.

Ezra looked up. “Who is it?” he asked.

Cody shrugged.

Ezra rose, still hugging the cat. Cody went with him as far as the stairs. He stopped there and leaned over the banister to eavesdrop, grinning. Ezra arrived in the living room. “You want me?” Cody heard him ask.

“Ezra Tull?” said Mr. Peters.

“Yes.”

“Well, ah … maybe there’s been a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“I’m from Peaceful Hills Memorial Gardens,” Mr. Peters said. “I thought you wished to purchase a resting place.”

“Resting place?”

“I thought you filled out this mail-in coupon: Ezra Tull, your signature. Yes, I would like an eternal home for myself and/or my loved ones. I understand that a sales representative will call.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Ezra.

“You didn’t fill this out. You’re not interested in a plot.”

“No, thank you.”

“I should have known,” said Mr. Peters.

“I’m sorry,” Ezra told him.

“Never mind, I can see it’s not your doing.”

“Maybe when I’m older, or something …”

“That’s all right, son. Never mind.”

Cody climbed to the stuffy, hot third floor, where Lorena Schmidt sat on his bed with her back against the wall. She was new to the neighborhood — a tawny girl with long black hair, one lock of which she was twining around a finger. “Who was that?” she asked Cody.

“A cemetery salesman.”

“Ugh.”

“He came to see Ezra.”

“Who’s Ezra?”

“My brother Ezra, dummy.”

“Well? How should I know?” Lorena said. “You mean that brother downstairs? Blondish kid, good-looking?”

“Good-looking! Ezra?”

“I liked his kind of serious face,” Lorena said. “And those pale gray eyes.”

“My eyes are gray.”

“Well. Anyhow,” Lorena said.

“Besides,” said Cody, “he gets fits.”

“He does?”

“He’ll fool you. He’ll look as normal as anyone else and then all of a sudden, splat! He’s flat on the floor, foaming at the mouth.”

“I don’t believe you,” Lorena said.

“Some people think he’s dangerous. I’m the only one brave enough to go near him, when he gets that way.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Lorena said.

She twisted around to the head of Cody’s bed and lifted a corner of the window shade. “I see your mother coming,” she said.

“What? Where?”

She turned and flashed him a grin. One of her front teeth was chipped, which made her look unstable, lacking in self-control. “I was teasing,” she said.

“Oh.”

“You ought to’ve seen your face. Ha! I haven’t even met your mother. How would I know if she was coming?”

“You must have met her,” Cody said. “She’s a cashier now at Sweeney Brothers Grocery. Folks around this neighborhood call her the Sweeney Meanie.”

“Well, we do our shopping at Esmond’s.”

“So would I,” said Cody.

“How come she works? Where’s your father?”

“Missing in action,” he told her.

“Oops, sorry.”

He gave a casual wave of his hand and took a swallow of beer. “She runs the cash register,” he said. “Look in Sweeney’s window, next time you go past. You’ll know her right off. Walk in and say, ‘Ma’am, this soup can’s dented. Can I have a reduction?’ ‘Soup’s soup,’ she’ll say. ‘Full price, please.’ ”

“Oh, one of those,” Lorena said.

“Tight little bun on the back of her head. Mouth like it’s holding straight pins. Anybody dawdles, tries to pass the time of day, she’ll say, ‘Move along, please. Please move along.’ ”

He was smiling at Lorena as he spoke, but inside he felt a sudden pang. He pictured his mother at the register, with that anxious line like a strand of hair or a faint, fragile dressmaker’s seam running across her forehead.

Cody took every blanket and sheet from Ezra’s bed and removed the pillow and the mattress. Underneath were four wooden slats, laid across the frame. He lifted them out and stored them in the wardrobe. With great care, he set the mattress back on the frame. He drew a breath and waited. The mattress held. He replaced the bedclothes and he puffed the pillow and laid it delicately at the head. He lugged a pile of magazines from their hiding place in his bureau, opened them, and scattered them on the floor. Then he turned off the light and went to his own bed, across the room.

Ezra padded in barefoot, eating a sandwich. He wore pajama bottoms with a trailing drawstring. “Oh, me,” he said, and he sank into bed. There was a crash. The floor shook, and their mother shrieked and came pounding up the stairs. When she turned on the light, Cody raised his head and stared at her with a sleepy, befuddled expression. She had a hand pressed to her heart. She was taking in gulps of air. Jenny shivered behind her, hugging a worn stuffed rabbit. “Good Lord preserve us,” their mother said.

Ezra looked like someone in a bathtub full of cloth. He was having trouble disentangling himself from his sheets. One hand, upraised, still clutched the half-eaten sandwich. “Ezra, honey,” Pearl said, but then she said, “Why, Ezra.” She was looking at the magazines. They were opened to pictures of women in nightgowns, in bathing suits, in garter belts and black lace brassieres, in bath towels, in useless wisps of transparent drapery, or in nothing whatsoever. “Ezra Tull!” she said.

Ezra worked his way up to peer over the edge of his bed frame.

“Truly, Ezra, I never suspected that you would be such a person,” she told him. Then she turned and left the room, taking Jenny with her.

Ezra emerged from his bed, flew through the air, and landed on Cody. He grabbed a handful of hair and started shaking Cody’s head. All Cody could say was, “Mmf! Mmf!” because he didn’t want their mother to hear. Finally he managed to bite Ezra’s knee and Ezra rolled off, panting and sobbing. He must have knocked into something at some earlier point, because his left eye was swelling. It made him look sad. Cody got up and showed him where he’d stashed the slats. They fitted them into place, heaved the mattress back on the frame, and attempted to smooth the blankets. Then Cody turned out the light, and they climbed into their beds and went to sleep.

Sometimes Cody dreamed about his father. He would be stepping through the doorway, wearing one of his salesman suits, bringing the afternoon paper as he always did on Friday. His ordinariness was astounding — his thick strings of hair and the tired, yellowish puffs beneath his eyes. (In waking memories, lately, he was not so real, but had blurred and leveled and lost his details.) “How was your week?” he asked, tediously. Cody’s mother answered, “Oh, all right.”

In these dreams, Cody was not his present self. He had somehow slid backward and become a toddler again, rushing around on tiny, fat legs, feverishly showing off. “See this? And this? See me somersault? See me pull my wagon?” His smallness colored every act; he was conscious of a desperate need to learn to manage, to take charge of his surroundings. Waking in the dark, the first thing he did was stretch his long legs and lift his arms, which were becoming veiny and roped with muscle. He thought of how it would be if his father returned some time in the future, when Cody was a man. “Look at what I’ve accomplished,” Cody would tell him. “Notice where I’ve got to, how far I’ve come without you.”

Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Was it something I didn’t do, that made you go away?

School started, and Cody entered ninth grade. He and his two best friends landed in the same homeroom. Sometimes Pete and Boyd came home with him; they all walked the long way, avoiding the grocery store where Cody’s mother worked. Cody had to keep things separate — his friends in one half of his life and his family in the other half. His mother hated for Cody to mix with outsiders. “Why don’t you ever have someone over?” she would ask, but she didn’t deceive him for a moment. He’d say, “Nah, I don’t need anybody,” and she would look pleased. “I guess your family’s enough for you, isn’t it?” she would ask. “Aren’t we lucky to have each other?”

He only allowed his friends in the house when his mother was at work, and sometimes for no reason he could name he would lead them through her belongings. He would open her smallest top bureau drawer and show them the real gold brooch that his father had given her when they were courting. “He thinks a lot of her,” he would say. “He’s given her heaps of stuff. Heaps. There’s heaps of other stuff that I just don’t happen to have on hand.” His friends looked bored. Switching tactics, Cody would show them her ironed handkerchiefs stacked so exactly that they seemed encased by an invisible square box. “I mean,” he said, “your mothers don’t do that, do they? Do they? Women!” he said, and then, musing over some mysterious metal clasp or something that was evidently used to hold up stockings, “Who can understand them? Really: can you figure them out? She likes Ezra best, my dumb brother Ezra. Sissy old Ezra. I mean, if it were Jenny, I could see it — Jenny being a girl and all. But Ezra! Who could like Ezra? Can you give me a single reason why?”

His friends shrugged, idly gazing around the room and jingling the loose change in their pockets.

He hid Ezra’s left sneaker, his arithmetic homework, his baseball mitt, his fountain pen, and his favorite sweater. He shut Ezra’s cat in the linen cupboard. He took Ezra’s bamboo whistle to school and put it in the jacket of Josiah Payson, Ezra’s best friend — a wild-eyed boy, the size of a full-grown man, who was thought by some to be feebleminded. It was typical of Ezra that he loved Josiah with all his heart, and would even have had him to the house if their mother weren’t scared of him. Cody stopped by when Ezra’s class was at lunch, and he slipped behind the cloakroom partition and stuck the whistle in the pocket of Josiah’s enormous black peacoat. After that there was a stretch of Indian summer and Josiah evidently left his jacket where it hung, so the whistle stayed lost for days. Ezra was very upset about it. “Have you seen my whistle?” he asked everybody. For once, Cody didn’t have to listen to “Greensleeves” and “The Ash Grove,” played on that breathy little pipe, whose range was so limited that for high notes, Ezra had to blow extra hard and split people’s eardrums. “You took it,” Ezra told Cody. “Didn’t you? I know you did.”

“What would I want with a stupid toy whistle?” Cody asked.

He was hoping that when it turned up in Josiah Payson’s pocket, Ezra would blame Josiah. But it didn’t happen that way. Whatever passed between them was settled without any fuss, and the two of them continued to be friends. Once again, a cracked, foggy “Ash Grove” burbled in every corner of the house.

Their mother went on one of her rampages. “Pearl has hit the warpath,” Cody told his brother and sister. He always called her Pearl at such times. “Better look out,” he said. “She’s dumped all Jenny’s bureau drawers.”

“Oh-oh,” Ezra said.

“She’s slamming things around and talking to herself.”

“Oh, boy,” Jenny said.

Cody had met the other two on the porch; they’d stayed late at school. He silently opened the door for them, and they crept up the stairs. Each took a great, lunging stride over the step that creaked — although surely their mother would not have heard them. She was making too much noise in the kitchen. Throwing pots through windowpanes, was what it sounded like.

They tiptoed across the hall to Jenny’s room. “What a mess!” Ezra breathed. Heaps of clothing covered the floor. Empty drawers had been hurled everywhere. The wardrobe stood open, its hangers stripped, and Jenny’s puff-sleeved dresses lay in a heap. Jenny stared from the doorway. “Jen?” Cody asked her. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Jenny said in a quavery voice.

“Think! Some little thing, something you’ve forgotten about …”

“Nothing. I promise.”

“Well, help me get these drawers back in,” he said to Ezra.

It was a two-man job. The drawers were oak, cumbersome and inclined to stick. Cody and Ezra grunted as they fitted them into the bureau. Jenny traveled around the room collecting her clothes. Tears had filled her eyes, and she kept dabbing at her nose with one or another rolled pair of socks. “Stop that,” Cody told her. “She’ll do it all again, if she finds snot on your socks.”

He and Ezra gathered slips and hair ribbons, shook out blouses, tried to get the dresses back on their hangers the way they’d been before. Some were hopelessly wrinkled, and those they smoothed as best they could and hid at the rear of the wardrobe. Meanwhile Jenny knelt on the floor, sniffling and folding undershirts.

“I wish we could just go off,” Ezra said, “and not come back till it’s over.”

“It won’t be over till she’s had her scene,” Cody told him. “You know that. There’s no way we can get around it.”

“I wish Daddy were here.”

“Well, he’s not, so shut up.”

Ezra straightened a sash.

After they’d put everything in order, the three of them sat in a row on Jenny’s bed. The sounds from the kitchen were different now — cutlery rattling, glassware clinking. Their mother must be setting the table. Pretty soon she’d serve supper. Cody had such a loaded feeling in his throat, he never wanted to eat again. No doubt the others felt the same; Ezra kept swallowing. Jenny said, “Let’s run away from home.”

“We don’t have anyplace to run to,” Cody said.

Their mother came to the foot of the stairs and called them. Her voice was thin, like the sound of a gnat. “Children.”

They filed down, dragging their feet. They stopped at the first-floor bathroom and meticulously scrubbed their hands, taking extra pains with the backs. Each one waited for the others. Then they went into the kitchen. Their mother was slicing a brick of Spam. She didn’t look at them, but she started speaking the instant they were seated. “It’s not enough that I should have to work till five p.m., no; then I come home and find nothing seen to, no chores done, you children off till all hours with disreputable characters in the alleys or wasting your time with school chorus, club meetings; table not set, breakfast dishes not washed, supper not cooked, floors not swept, mail in a heap on the mat … and not a sign of any of you. Oh, I know what’s going on! I know what you three are up to! Neighborhood savages, that’s what you are, mingling with each and all. How am I supposed to deal with this? How am I expected to cope? Useless daughter, great unruly bruising boys … I know what people are saying. You think my customers aren’t glad to tell me? Coming in simpering, Well, Mrs. Tull, that oldest boy of yours is certainly growing up. I saw him with a pack of Camels in the street in front of the Barlow girl’s house.’ And I have to smile and take it. Have to stand there on exhibit while they’re all thinking, ‘Poor Mrs. Tull, I don’t know how she can hold her head up. It’s clear she doesn’t have the least ability to handle those children; look at how they’re disgracing her.’ Sticking potatoes on people’s exhaust pipes and letting the air out of tires and shooting at streetlights with BB guns and stealing hubcaps and making off with traffic signs and moving Mrs. Correlli’s madonna to Sonny Boy Brown’s kitchen stoop and hanging around the hydrants with girls no better than tramps, girls in tight sweaters and ankle chains, oh, I hear about it everywhere …”

“But not me, Mama,” Jenny said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t do those things.”

Well, of course she didn’t (only Cody did), but she shouldn’t have pointed that out. Now she’d drawn attention to herself. Pearl turned, gathered force, and plunged. “You! I know about you. I couldn’t believe my ears. What should I be doing but coming down the church steps Sunday when I see you with that Melanie Miller from your Bible class. ‘Oh, Melanie …’ ” She made her voice shrill and prissy, nothing like Jenny’s, really. “ ‘Melanie, I just love your dress. I wish I had a dress like that.’ Understand,” she said, turning to the boys, “this was a cheap little number from Sears. The plaid wasn’t matched; there was a ruffle at the hem like a … square dance outfit and a bunch of artificial flowers pinned to the waist. A totally inappropriate dress for a nine-year-old, or for anyone. But ‘Oh, I wish I had that,’ your sister says, so everyone thinks, ‘Poor Mrs. Tull, she can’t even afford a Sears and Roebuck dress with artificial flowers; I don’t know how she manages, slaving away at that grocery all day and struggling over her budget at night, cutting here and cutting there, wondering will she scrape by, hoping nobody runs up a doctor bill, praying her children’s feet will stop growing …’

“And Melanie’s mother, well, it’s just like opening the door to such a person. First thing you know she’ll be walking in here big as life: ‘Mrs. Tull, I happen to have the catalogue we ordered Melanie’s dress from, if you would care for one for Jenny.’ As if I’d want to dress my daughter like an orphan! As if I’d like for her to duplicate some other child! ‘No, thank you, Mrs. Miller,’ I’ll say. ‘I may not be able to afford so very much but at least when I do buy, I buy with finished seams. No, Mrs. Miller, you keep your so-called wish book, your quarter-inch hem allowances, smashed felt flowers …’ What’s wrong with us, I’d like to know? Aren’t we good enough for my own blood daughter? Doesn’t she feel I’m doing my best, my level best, to provide? Does she have to pick up riffraff? Does she have to bring home scum? We’re a family! We used to be so close! What happened to us? Why would she act so disloyal?”

She sat down serenely, as if finished with the subject forever, and reached for a bowl of peas. Jenny’s face was streaming with tears, but she wasn’t making a sound and Pearl seemed unaware of her. Cody cleared his throat.

“But that was Sunday,” he said.

Pearl’s serving spoon paused, midway between the bowl and her plate. She looked politely interested. “Yes?” she said.

“This is Wednesday.”

“Yes.”

“It’s Wednesday, dammit; it’s three days later. So why bring up something from Sunday?”

Pearl threw the spoon in his face. “You upstart,” she said. She rose and slapped him across the cheek. “You wretch, you ugly horror.” She grabbed one of Jenny’s braids and yanked it so Jenny was pulled off her chair. “Stupid clod,” she said to Ezra, and she took the bowl of peas and brought it down on his head. It didn’t break, but peas flew everywhere. Ezra cowered, shielding his head with his arms. “Parasites,” she told them. “I wish you’d all die, and let me go free. I wish I’d find you dead in your beds.”

After that, she went upstairs. The three of them washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away in the cupboards. They wiped the table and countertops and swept the kitchen floor. The sight of any crumb or stain was a relief, a pleasure; they attacked it with Bon Ami. They pulled the shades in the windows and locked the back door. Outside, the neighborhood children were organizing a game of hide-and-seek, but their voices were so faint that they seemed removed in time as well as in space. They were like people from long ago, laughing and calling only in memory, or in one of those eerily lifelike dreams that begin on the edge of sleep.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, a girl named Edith Taber transferred to their school. Cody had been new to so many schools himself, he recognized that defiant tilt of her head when she stepped into his homeroom. She carried a zippered notebook that wasn’t the right kind at all, and over her skirt she wore what appeared to be a grown man’s shirt, which no one had ever heard of doing. But she had thick black hair and the kind of gypsy look that Cody liked; and he was also drawn by the proud and scornful way she walked alone to her classes — as friendless as Cody was, he thought, or at least, as friendless as he felt inside. So that afternoon he walked a short distance behind her (it turned out she lived just one block north of him), and the next afternoon he caught up and walked beside her. She seemed to welcome his company and talked to him nearly nonstop, every now and then clutching her coat collar tight against her throat in a gesture that struck him as sophisticated. Her brother was in the navy, she said, and had promised to bring her a silk kimono if he made it through the war. And she didn’t find that Baltimore was very cosmopolitan, and she thought Miss Saunders, the English teacher, resembled Lana Turner. She said she felt it was really attractive when boys didn’t slick their hair back but let it fall over their foreheads, straight, the way Cody did. Cody raked his fingers through his hair and said, well, he didn’t know about that; he’d always sort of supposed that girls preferred a little wave or curl or something. She said she just despised for a boy to have curls. They walked the rest of the way without speaking, although from time to time Cody whistled parts of the only tune that came to his mind, which happened to be “The Ash Grove.”

He couldn’t walk her home on Wednesday because he had to stay late for detention, and the following day was Thanksgiving. There wouldn’t be any more school till Monday. All Thursday morning, he hung around the front porch in the damp November chill, gazing northward to Edith’s street and then wheeling away and taking midair punches at a cushion from the glider. Finally his mother emerged, rosy from the kitchen, and coaxed him inside. “Cody, honey, you’ll freeze to death. Come and shell me some pecans.” They were having a meager meal — no turkey — but she’d promised to make a pie for dessert. Already the house smelled different: spicier, more festive. Cody would have stayed on the porch forever, though, if he’d thought there was a chance of seeing Edith.

After dinner they all played Monopoly. Generally, Cody’s family didn’t allow him in their games; he had this problem with winning. He absolutely insisted on winning any game he played. And he did win too — by sheer fierceness, by caring the most. (Also, he’d been known to cheat.) Sometimes, he would even win when no one else suspected it was a contest. He would eat more peanuts, get his corn shucked the fastest, or finish his page of the comics first. “Go away,” his family would say when he approached (nonchalantly shuffling cards or tossing a pair of dice). “You know what we said. Never again!” But this afternoon, they let him play. He tried to hold back, but once he’d bought a hotel on the Boardwalk, things got out of hand. “Oh, my, I should have remembered,” his mother said. “What’s he doing in this game?” But she was smiling. She wore her blue wool dress and her hair was coming out of its bun, which made her look relaxed. Her token was the flatiron. She skipped right over the Boardwalk, but Ezra was next and he hit it. He didn’t have anywhere near enough money. Cody tried to lend him some; he hated it when people just gave up. He liked to get everybody thousands of dollars in debt, struggling to the bitter end. But Ezra said, “No, no, I quit,” and backed off, holding up one palm in that old-mannish way he had. So Cody had to go on with just Jenny and his mother, and eventually with just his mother. They played right down to the line, when she landed on the Boardwalk with three dollar bills to her name. As a matter of fact, Cody had a pretty good time.

Then the younger two talked Cody and Pearl into putting on their old skit: “The Mortgage Overdue.” “Oh, come on! Please! It wouldn’t feel like a holiday without it.” Cody and Pearl ended up agreeing to it, even though they were rusty and Cody couldn’t remember the dance step that came at the finish. This was something salvaged from his mother’s girlhood, the kind of piece performed at amateur recital contests or campfire circles. Pearl played Ivy, the maiden in distress, and Cody was the villain twirling his waxed mustache. “Ivy, sweet sweet Ivy, lean upon my arm,” he cajoled her with an evil leer, while Pearl rolled her eyes and shrank into a corner. She could have been an actress, her children thought; she had it letter-perfect, the blushing gaze and the old-fashioned singsong of her responses. At the end the hero came and rescued her. Ezra and Jenny always claimed to be too shy, so Cody had to take the hero’s part as well. “I will pay the money for the mortgage on the farm,” he told the maiden, and he danced her into the dining room. The dance step came back to him after all, but his mother’s tongue got twisted and instead of wedded life she said leaded wife and collapsed in a heap of giggles. Jenny and Ezra gave them three curtain calls.

That evening, Cody went out to the porch and looked northward some more in the twilight. Ezra came too and sat in the glider, pushing back and forth with the heel of one sneaker. “Want to walk toward Sloop Street?” Cody asked him.

“What’s on Sloop Street?”

“Nothing much. This girl I know, Edith Taber.”

“Oh, yes. Edith,” Ezra said.

“You know who she is?”

“She’s got this whistle,” Ezra said, “that plays sharps and flats with hardly any extra trouble.”

“Edith Taber?”

“A recorder.”

“You’re thinking of someone else,” Cody told him.

“Well, maybe so.”

Cody was silent a moment, leaning on the porch railing. Ezra creaked companionably in the glider. Then Cody said, “A black-haired girl. Ninth-grader.”

“New in town,” Ezra agreed.

“When’d you see her?”

“Just yesterday,” Ezra said. “I was walking home from school, playing my whistle, and she caught up with me and said she liked it and asked if I wanted to see her recorder. So I went to her house and I saw it.”

“To her house? Did she know you were my brother?”

“Well, no, I don’t think so,” Ezra said. “She has a parakeet that burps and says, ‘Forgive me.’ Her mother served us cookies.”

“You met her mother?”

“It would be nice to have a recorder, someday.”

“She’s too old for you,” Cody said.

Ezra looked surprised. “Well, of course,” he said. “She’s fourteen and a half.”

“What would she want with a little sixth-grader?”

“She wanted to show me her whistle,” Ezra said.

“Shoot,” said Cody.

“Cody? Are we going to walk toward Sloop Street?”

“Nah,” said Cody. He kicked a pillar.

“If I asked Mother,” Ezra said, “do you think she would get me one of those recorders for Christmas?”

“You dunce,” said Cody. “You raving idiot. Do you think she’s got money to spare for goddamn whistles?”

“Well, no, I guess not,” Ezra said.

Then Cody went into the house and locked the door, and when Ezra started pounding on it Cody told their mother it was only Mr. Milledge, having one of his crazy spells.

Monday morning, he looked for Edith on the way to school but he didn’t see her. As it turned out, she was tardy. She arrived in homeroom just after the bell. He tried to catch her eye but she didn’t glance his way; only gazed fixedly at the teacher all during announcements. And when the first bell rang she walked to class with Sue Meeks and Harriet Smith. Evidently, she was no longer friendless.

By third period, it was clear she was avoiding him. He couldn’t even get near her; she had a constant bodyguard. But what had he done wrong? He cornered Barbara Pace — a plump, cheerful redhead who served as a kind of central switchboard for ninth-grade couples. “What’s the matter with Edith?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Edith Taber. We were getting along just fine and now she won’t speak.”

“Oh,” she said. She shifted her books. She was wearing a man-sized shirt with the tails out. Come to think of it, so were half the other girls. “Well,” she said, “I guess she likes somebody else now.”

“Is it my brother?” Cody asked.

“Who’s your brother?”

“Ezra. My brother, Ezra.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” she said, peering at him.

“Well, she liked me well enough last week. What happened?”

“See,” she told him patiently, “now she’s been to a couple of parties and naturally she’s developed new interests. She’s got a sort of … broader view, and also she didn’t realize about your reputation.”

“What reputation?”

“Well, you do drink, Cody. And you hung around with that cheap Lorena Schmidt all summer; you smell like a walking cigarette; and you almost got arrested over Halloween.”

“Did my brother tell her that?”

“What’s this about your brother? Everybody told her. It’s not exactly a secret.”

“Well, I never claimed to be a saint,” Cody said.

“She says you’re real good-looking and all but she wants a boy she can respect,” said Barbara. “She thinks she might like Francis Elburn now.”

“Francis Elburn! That fairy.”

“He’s really more her type,” said Barbara.

“His hair is curly.”

“So?”

“Francis Elburn; Jesus Christ.”

“There’s no need to use profanity,” Barbara told him.

Cody walked home alone, long after the others had left, choosing streets where he’d be certain not to run into Edith or her friends. Once he turned down the wrong alley and it struck him that he was still an outsider, unfamiliar with the neighborhood. His classmates had been born and raised here, most of them, and were more comfortable with each other than he could ever hope to be. Look at his two best friends: their parents went to the movies together; their mothers talked on the telephone. His mother … He kicked a signpost. What he wouldn’t give to have a mother who acted like other mothers! He longed to see her gossiping with a little gang of women in the kitchen, letting them roll her hair up in pincurls, trading beauty secrets, playing cards, losing track of time—“Oh, goodness, look at the clock! And supper not even started; my husband will kill me. Run along, girls.” He wished she had some outside connection, something beyond that suffocating house.

And his father: he had uprooted the family continually, tearing them away as soon as they were settled and plunking them someplace new. But where was he now that Cody wanted to be uprooted, now that he was saddled with a reputation and desperate to leave and start over? His father had ruined their lives, Cody thought — first in one way and then in another. He thought of tracking him down and arriving on his doorstep: “I’m in trouble; it’s all your fault. I’ve got a bad name, I need to leave town, you’ll have to take me in.” But that would only be another unknown city, another new school to walk into alone. And there too, probably, his grades would begin to slip and the neighbors would complain and the teachers would start to suspect him first when any little thing went wrong; and then Ezra would follow shortly in his dogged, earnest, devoted way and everybody would say to Cody, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”

He let himself into the house, which smelled of last night’s cabbage. It was almost dark and the air seemed thick; he felt he had to labor to move through it. He climbed the stairs wearily. He passed Jenny’s room, where she sat doing her homework in a tiny dull circle of yellow from the lamp. Her face was thin and shadowed and she didn’t bother greeting him. He climbed on up to his own room and flicked on the light switch. He had set his books on the bureau before he realized Ezra was there. Asleep, as usual — curled on his bed with a sheaf of homework papers. Oh, Ezra was so slow and dazed; he could sleep anytime. His lips were parted. His cat, Alicia, lay in the crook of his arm, purring and looking self-satisfied.

Cody knelt beside his bed and pulled from beneath it a half-filled bottle of bourbon, an empty gin bottle, five empty beer bottles, a crumpled pack of Camels, and a box of pretzels. He strewed them around Ezra, arranging them just right. He went to the hall storage closet and took out his father’s Six-20 Brownie camera. In the doorway of his room, he aimed and paused and clicked the shutter. Ezra didn’t wake, amazingly enough. (The light from the flashgun was so powerful, you’d see swimming blue globes for minutes after being photographed.) But the cat seemed mildly disturbed. She got to her feet and yawned. What a yawn! — huge and disdainful. It would have made a wonderful picture: deadbeat Ezra and his no-account cat, both with gaping mouths. Cody wondered if she’d do it again. “Yawn,” he told her, and he advanced the film for another photo. “Alicia? Yawn.” She only smirked and settled down again. He yawned himself, demonstrating, but apparently cats didn’t find such things contagious. He lowered the camera and came closer to pat her head, scratch beneath her chin, stroke her throat. Nothing worked. “Yawn, dammit,” he said, and he tried to pry her teeth apart by force. She drew up sharply, eyes wide and glaring. Ezra woke.

“Your cat is retarded,” Cody told him.

“Huh?”

“I can’t get her to yawn.”

Ezra reached over, matter-of-factly, and circled the cat with his arm. She gave a luxurious yawn and nestled down against him, and Ezra went back to sleep. Cody didn’t try for another picture, though. He’d never seen anyone take the fun out of things the way Ezra could.

Cody and Ezra and Jenny went shopping for a Christmas present for their mother. Each of them had saved four weeks’ allowance, which meant forty cents apiece, and Cody had a dollar extra that he’d taken from Miss Saunders’s center desk drawer. That made two dollars and twenty cents — enough for some winter gloves, Cody suggested. Jenny said gloves were boring and she wanted to buy a diamond ring. “That’s really stupid,” Cody told her. “Even you ought to know you can’t buy a diamond ring for two-twenty.”

“I don’t mean a real one, I mean glass. Or anything, just so it’s pretty and not useful.”

They were forced to shop in the stores near home, since they didn’t want to spend money on carfare. It was mid-December and crowds of other people were shopping too — plowing past with their arms full of packages, breathing white clouds in the frosty air. Further downtown the department store windows would be as rich and bright as the insides of jewel boxes, and there’d be carols and clanging brass bells and festoons of tinsel on the traffic lights, but in this neighborhood the shops were smaller, darker, decorated with a single wreath on the door or a cardboard Santa Claus carrying a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. Soldiers on leave straggled by in clumps, looking lost. The shoppers had something grim and determined about them — even those with the gaudiest packages. They seemed likely to mow down anyone in their path. Cody took a pinch of Jenny’s coat sleeve so as not to lose her.

“I’m serious,” she was saying. “I don’t want to get her anything warm. Anything necessary. Anything—”

“Serviceable,” Ezra said.

They all grimaced.

“If we bought her a ring, though,” Ezra said, “she might feel bad about the wastefulness. She might not really enjoy it.”

Cody hated the radiant, grave expression that Ezra wore sometimes; it showed that he realized full well how considerate he was being. “What do you want for Christmas?” Cody asked him roughly. “World peace?”

“World what? I’d like a recorder,” Ezra said.

They crossed an intersection with a swarm of sailors. “Well,” said Cody, “you’re not getting one.”

“I know that.”

“You’re getting a cap with turn-down earflaps and a pair of corduroy pants.”

“Cody!” said Jenny. “You weren’t supposed to tell.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ezra said.

They separated for a woman who had stopped to fit her child’s mittens on. “It used to be,” Jenny said, “that we got toys for Christmas, and candy. Remember how nice last Christmas was?”

“This one’s going to be nice too,” Ezra told her.

“Remember down in Virginia, when Daddy bought us a sled, and Mother said it was silly because it hardly ever snowed but December twenty-sixth we woke up and there was snow all over everything?”

“That was fun,” Ezra said.

“We had the only sled in town,” Jenny said. “Cody started charging for rides. Daddy showed us how to wax the runners and we pulled it to the top of that hill … What was the name of that hill? It had such a funny—”

Then she stopped short on the sidewalk. Pedestrians jostled all around her. “Why,” she said.

Cody and Ezra looked at her.

“He’s really not ever coming home again. Is he,” she said.

No one answered. After a minute they resumed walking, three abreast, and Cody took a pinch of Ezra’s sleeve, too, so they wouldn’t drift apart in the crowd.

Cody sorted the mail, setting aside for his mother a couple of envelopes that looked like Christmas cards. He threw away a department store flyer and a letter from his school. He pocketed an envelope with a Cleveland postmark.

He went upstairs to his room and switched on the goose-necked lamp beside his bed. While the lightbulb warmed, he whistled and stared out the window. Then he tested the bulb with his fingers and, finding it hot enough, wrapped the envelope around it and counted slowly to thirty. After that he pried open the flap with ease and pulled out a single sheet of paper and a check.

… says they should be producing to capacity by June of ’45 … his father wrote. Sorry the enclosed is a little smaller than expected as I have incurred some … It was his usual letter, nothing different. Cody folded it again and slid it back in the envelope, though it hardly seemed worth the effort. Then he heard the front door slam. “Ezra Tull?” Pearl called. Her cloppy high heels started rapidly up the stairs. Cody tucked the envelope into his bureau and shut the drawer. “Ezra!”

“He’s not here,” Cody said.

She came to stand in the doorway. “Where is he?” she asked. She was out of breath, untidy-looking. Her hat was on crooked and she still wore her coat.

“He went to get the laundry, like you told him to.”

“What do you know about this?”

She bore down on him, holding out a stack of snapshots. The one on top was so blurred and gray that Cody had trouble deciphering it. He took the whole collection from her hand. Ah, yes: Ezra lay in a stupor, surrounded by liquor bottles. Cody grinned. He’d forgotten that picture completely.

“What could it mean?” his mother asked. “I take a roll of film to the drugstore and I come back with the shock of my life. I just wanted to get the camera ready for Christmas. I was expecting maybe some scenes from last summer, or Jenny’s birthday cake … and here I find Ezra like a derelict! A common drunk! Could this be what it looks like? Answer me!”

“He’s not as perfect as you think he is,” Cody told her.

“But he’s never given me a moment’s worry.”

“He’s done a lot that might surprise you.”

Pearl sat down on his bed. She was shaking her head, looking stunned. “Oh, Cody, it’s such a battle, raising children,” she said. “I know you must think I’m difficult. I lose my temper, I carry on like a shrew sometimes, but if you could just realize how … helpless I feel! How scary it is to know that everyone I love depends on me! I’m afraid I’ll do something wrong.”

She reached up — for the photos, he thought, and he held them out to her; but no, what she wanted was his hand. She took it and pulled him down beside her. Her skin felt hot and dry. “I’ve probably been too hard on you,” she said. “But I look to you for support now, Cody. You’re the only person I can turn to; it may be you and I are more alike than you think. Cody, what am I going to do?”

She leaned closer, and Cody drew back. Even her eyes seemed to give off heat. “Uh, well …” he said.

“Who took that picture, anyhow? Was it you?”

“Look,” he said. “It was a joke.”

“Joke?”

“Ezra didn’t drink that stuff. I just set some bottles around him.”

Her gaze flicked back and forth across his face.

“He’s never touched a drop,” Cody told her.

“I see,” she said. She freed his hand. She said, “Well, all I can say is, that’s some joke, young man.” Then she stood up and took several steps away from him. “That’s some sense of humor you’ve got,” she said.

Cody shrugged.

“Oh, I suppose it must seem very funny, scaring your mother half out of her wits. Letting her babble on like a fool. Slandering your little brother. It must seem hilarious, to someone like you.”

“I’m just naturally mean, I guess,” Cody said.

“You’ve been mean since the day you were born,” she told him.

After she had walked out, he went to work resealing his father’s letter.

Ezra landed on Park Place and Cody said, “Aha! Park Place with one hotel. Fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Poor, poor Ezra,” Jenny said.

“How’d you do that?” Ezra asked Cody.

“How’d I do what?”

“How’d you get a hotel on Park Place? A minute ago it was mortgaged.”

“Oh, I scrimped and saved,” Cody said.

“There’s something peculiar going on here.”

“Mother!” Jenny called. “Cody’s cheating again!”

Their mother was stringing the Christmas tree lights. She looked over and said, “Cody.”

“What did I do?” Cody asked.

“What did he do, children?”

“He’s the banker,” Jenny said. “He made us let him keep the bank and the deeds and the houses. Now he’s got a hotel on Park Place and all this extra money. It’s not fair!”

Pearl set down the box of lights and came over to where they were sitting. She said, “All right, Cody, put it back. Jenny keeps the deeds from now on; Ezra keeps the bank. Is that clear?”

Jenny reached for the deeds. Ezra began collecting the money.

“And I tell you this,” Pearl said. “If I hear one more word, Cody Tull, you’re out of the game. Forever! Understood?” She bent to help Ezra. “Always cheating, tormenting, causing trouble …” She laid the fives beside the ones, the tens beside the fives. “Cody? You hear what I say?”

He heard, but he didn’t bother answering. He sat back and smiled, safe and removed, watching her stack the money.