Free Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler Page A

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’sfamily 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, theblushing 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