Anne Tyler - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“That was thoughtful of you,” Ruth told Ezra, “but really, we’re fine, and we wouldn’t want to hold people up.”

Ezra checked his watch. He glanced behind him, toward the dining room. “It’s only ten-fifteen,” he said. He walked over to a front window and lifted the curtain.

Now that it was apparent he had something on his mind, the others stood waiting. (He could be maddeningly slow, and all the slower if pushed.)

“It’s like this,” he said finally.

He coughed.

“I was kind of expecting Dad,” he said.

There was a blank, flat pause.

“Who?” Cody asked.

“Our father.”

“But how would he know?”

“Well, ah, I invited him.”

“Ezra, for God’s sake,” Cody said.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Ezra said. “It was Mother’s. She talked about it when she got so sick. She said, ‘Look in my address book. Ask everybody in it to my funeral.’ I wondered who she meant, at first. You know she never wrote anyone, and most of her relatives are dead. But as soon as I opened the address book I saw it: Beck Tull. I didn’t even realize she knew where he had run off to.”

“He wrote her; that’s how she knew,” Cody said.

“He did?”

“From time to time he sent these letters, boasting, bragging. Doing fine … expecting a raise … I peeked inside when Mother wasn’t looking.”

“I never even guessed,” said Ezra.

“What difference would it have made?”

“Oh, I don’t know …”

“He ditched us,” Cody said, “when we were kids. What do you care about him now?”

“Well, I don’t,” said Ezra. And Cody, who had so often been exasperated by Ezra’s soft heart, saw that in this case, it was true: he really didn’t care. He looked directly at Cody with his peculiarly clear, light-filled eyes, and he said, “It was Mother who asked; not me. All I did was call him up and say, ‘This is Ezra. Mother has died and we’re holding her funeral Monday at eleven.’ ”

“That was all? ” Cody said.

“Well, and then I told him he could stop by the house first, if he got here early.”

“But you didn’t ask, ‘How are you?’ or ‘Where’ve you been?’ or ‘Why’d you go?’ ”

“I just said, ‘This is Ezra. Mother has died and—’ ”

Cody laughed.

“At any rate,” Jenny said, “it doesn’t seem he’s coming.”

“No,” said Cody, “but think about it. I mean, don’t you get it? First he leaves and Mother pretends he hasn’t. Out of pride, or spite, or something , she never says a word about it, makes believe to all of us that he’s only on a business trip. A thirty-five-year business trip. Then Ezra calls him on the phone and does the very same thing. ‘This is Ezra,’ he says, as if he’d seen Dad just yesterday—”

Jenny said, “Can we get started now? My children will be freezing to death.”

“Oh, surely,” Ruth told her. “Cody, honey, her children are waiting on us.”

“Mother would have done that, just exactly,” Cody said. “If Dad had walked in she would have said, ‘Ah, yes, there you are. Can you tell me if my slip is showing?’ ”

Joe gave a little bark of laughter. Ezra smiled, but his eyes filmed over with tears. “That’s true,” he said. “She would have. You know? She really would have.”

“Fine, then, she would have,” Jenny said. “Shall we go?”

She had been so young when their father left, anyhow. She claimed to have forgotten all about him.

At the funeral, the minister, who had never met their mother, delivered a eulogy so vague, so general, so universally applicable that Cody thought of that parlor game where people fill in words at random and then giggle hysterically at the story that results. Pearl Tull, the minister said, was a devoted wife and a loving mother and a pillar of the community. She had lived a long, full life and died in the bosom of her family, who grieved for her but took comfort in knowing that she’d gone to a far finer place.

It slipped the minister’s mind, or perhaps he hadn’t heard, that she hadn’t been anyone’s wife for over a third of a century; that she’d been a frantic, angry, sometimes terrifying mother; and that she’d never shown the faintest interest in her community but dwelt in it like a visitor from a superior neighborhood, always wearing her hat when out walking, keeping her doors tightly shut when at home. That her life had been very long indeed but never full; stunted was more like it. Or crabbed. Or … what was the word Cody wanted? Espaliered. Twisted and flattened to the wall — all the more so as she’d aged and wizened, lost her sight, and grown to lean too heavily on Ezra. That she was not at all religious, hadn’t set foot in this church for decades; and though in certain wistful moods she might have mentioned the possibility of paradise, Cody didn’t take much comfort in the notion of her residing there, fidgeting and finding fault and stirring up dissatisfactions.

Cody sat in the right front pew, the picture of a bereaved and dutiful son. But skeptical thoughts flowed through his head so loudly that he almost believed they might be heard by the congregation. He was back to his boyhood, it seemed, fearing that his mother could read his mind as unhesitatingly as she read the inner temperature of a roasting hen by giving its thigh a single, contemptuous pinch. He glanced sideways at Ruth, but she was listening to the minister.

The minister announced the closing hymn, which Pearl had requested in her funeral instructions: “We’ll Understand It All By and By.” Raising his long, boneless face to lead the singing, Reverend Thurman did appear bewildered — perhaps less by the Lord’s mysterious ways than by the unresponsive nature of this group of mourners. Most were just staring into open hymn-books, following each stanza silently. And there were so few of them: a couple of Ezra’s co-workers, some surly teen-aged grandchildren sulking in scattered pews, and five or six anonymous old people, who were probably there as church members but gave the impression of having wandered in off the streets for shelter, dragging their string-handled shopping bags.

When the service was finished, the minister descended from the pulpit and stopped to offer Cody, as firstborn, a handshake and condolences. “All my sympathy … know what a loss …”

“Thank you,” said Cody, and he and Ruth and the minister proceeded down the aisle. Jenny and Joe followed, and last came Ezra, blowing his nose. By rights the grandchildren should have risen too, but if they had there would have been hardly any guests remaining.

Outside, the cold was a relief, and Cody was grateful for the lumbering noise of the traffic in the street. He stood between Jenny and Ruth and accepted the murmurs of strangers. “Beautiful service,” they told him.

“Thank you,” he said.

He heard a woman say to Ezra, over by the church doorway, “I’m so sorry for your trouble,” and Ezra said, kindly, “Oh, that’s all right”—although for Ezra alone, of the three of them, this death was clearly not all right. What would he fill his life with now? He had been his mother’s eyes. Lately, he had been her hands and feet as well. Now that she was gone he would come home every night and … do what? What would he do? Just sit on the couch by himself, Cody pictured; or lie on his bed, fully dressed, staring into the swarming, brownish air above his bed.

Jenny said, “Did Ezra tell you we’re meeting at his restaurant afterward?”

Cody groaned. He shook an old man’s hand and said to Jenny, “I knew it. I just knew it.” Hadn’t he told Ruth, in fact? In the car coming down, he’d said, “Oh, God, I suppose there’ll be one of those dinners. We’ll have to have one of those eternal family dinners at Ezra’s restaurant.”