Free Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

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 pul ed 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 al 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 pul ed 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 wel as in space. They were like people from long ago, laughing and cal ing 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 al , 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 col ar 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 real y attractive when boys didn’t slick their hair back but let it fal over their foreheads, straight, the way Cody did.

    Cody raked his fingers through his hair and said, wel , 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 fol owing day was Thanksgiving. There wouldn’t be any more school til Monday. Al Thursday morning, he hung around the front porch in the damp November chil , gazing northward to Edith’s street and