Read Online Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler - Free Book Online

left eye was swel ing. 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, yel owish 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, al 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 pul my wagon?” His smal ness 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 tel 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 al 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 al owed 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 smal est 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? Real y: 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 al . 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 basebal 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 ful -grown man, who was thought by some to be feebleminded. It was typical of Ezra that he loved Josiah with al his heart, and would even have had him to the house if their mother weren’t scared of him. Cody stopped by