Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler Page A

clipboard. In the background, Josiah Payson swung a gigantic rubber mal et against the fender of a pickup. Jenny was hit by a piece of memory, a mystifying fragment: Josiah in the school yard, long ago, violently flailing a pipe or a metal bar of some sort, cutting a desperate, whizzing circle in the air and shouting something unintel igible while Ezra stood guard between him and a mob of children.
    “Everything wil be fine; just go away,” Ezra was tel ing the others. But what had happened next? How had it ended?
    How had it started? She felt confused. Meanwhile Josiah swung his mal et. He was grotesquely tal , as gaunt as the armature for some statue never completed. His cropped black hair bristled al over his head, his skul of a face glistened, and he clenched a set of teeth so ragged and white and crowded, so jumbled together and overlapping, that it seemed he had chewed them up and was preparing to spit them out.

    “Josiah,” she cal ed timidly.
    He stopped to look at her. Or was he looking someplace else? His eyes were dead black— lidless and almost Oriental. It was impossible to tel where they were directed.
    He heaved the hammer onto a stack of burlap bags and lunged toward her, his face alight with happiness. “Ezra’s sister!” he said. “Ezra!”
    She smiled and hugged her elbows.
    Directly in front of her, he came to a halt and smoothed his stubble of hair. His arms seemed longer than they should have been. “Is Ezra okay?” he asked her.
    “He’s fine.”
    “Not wounded or—his “No.”
    Ezra was right: Josiah spoke as distinctly as anyone, in a grown man’s rumbling voice. But he had trouble finding something to do with his hands, and ended up scraping them together as if trying to rid his palms of dirt or grease, or even of a layer of skin. She was aware of Tom and Eddie glancing over at her curiously, losing track of their conversation. “Come outside,” she told Josiah. “I’l let you see his letter.”
    Outside it was twilight, almost too dark to read, but Josiah took the letter anyway and scanned the lines. There was a crease between his eyebrows as deep as if someone had pressed an ax blade there. She noticed that his coveral s, pathetical y wel washed, were so short for him that his fal en white socks and hairy shinbones showed. His lips could barely close over that chaos of teeth; his mouth had a bunchy look and his chin was elongated from the effort.
    He handed the letter back to her. She had no way of knowing what he had got out of it. “If they’d let me,” he said,
    “I’d have gone with him. Oh, I wouldn’t mind going. But they claimed I was too tal .”
    “Too tal ?”
    She’d never heard of such a thing.
    “So I had to stay behind,” he said, “but I didn’t want to. I don’t want to work in a body shop al my life; I plan to do something different.”
    “Like what?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Find something with Ezra, I guess, once he gets out of the army. Ezra, he would always come to visit me here and look around and say, “How can you stand it?
    Al the noise,” he’d say. “We got to find you something different.” But I didn’t know where to start hunting, and now Ezra’s gone away. It’s not the noise that’s so bad, but it’s hot in summer and cold in winter. My feet get bothered by the cold, get these itchy things al over the toes.”
    “Chilblains, maybe,” Jenny suggested. She felt pleasantly bored; it seemed she had known Josiah forever. She ran a thumbnail down the crease of Ezra’s letter. Josiah gazed either at her or straight through her (it was hard to tel which) and cracked his knuckles.
    “Probably what I’l do is work for Ezra,” he said, “once Ezra opens his restaurant.”
    “What are you talking about? Ezra’s not opening a restaurant.”
    “Sure he is.”
    “Why would he want to do that? As soon as he pul s himself together he’s going off to col ege, studying to be a teacher.”
    “Who says so?” Josiah