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

attended forty years ago, where they’d offered up an antique brass bed complete with all its bedclothes—sheets and blankets, pillow in a linen case embroidered with forget-me-nots. Two men wheeled it onto the platform, and its ruffled coverlet stirred like a young girl’s petticoats. Behind her eyelids, Pearl Tull climbed in and laid her head on the pillow and was borne away to the beach, where three small children ran toward her, laughing, across the sunlit sand.

2
 Teaching the Cat to Yawn
    While Cody’s father nailed the target to the tree trunk, Cody tested the bow. He drew the string back, laid his cheek against it, and narrowed his eyes at the target. His father was pounding in tacks with his shoe; he hadn’t thought to bring a hammer. He looked like a fool, Cody thought. He owned no weekend clothes, as other fathers did, but had driven to this field in his strained-looking brown striped salesman suit, white starched shirt, and navy tie with multicolored squares and circles scattered randomly across it. The only way you could tell this was a Sunday was when he turned, having pounded in the final tack; he didn’t have his tie pulled up close to his collar. It hung loose and slightly crooked, like a drunkard’s tie. A cockscomb of hair, as black as Cody’s but wavy, stood up on his forehead.
    “There!” he said, plodding back. He still carried the shoe. He walked lopsided, either smiling at Cody or squinting in the sunlight. It was nowhere near spring yet, but the air felt unseasonably warm and a pale sun poured heat like a liquid over Cody’s shoulders. Cody bent and pulled an arrow from a cardboard tube. He laid it against the string. “Wait, now, son,” his father said. “You want to do things right, now.”
    Naturally, this would have to be an educational experience. There were bound to be lectures and criticisms attached. Cody sighed and lowered the bow. His father stooped to put his shoeon, squirming his foot in without undoing the laces, the way Cody’s mother hated. The heel of his black rayon sock was worn so thin it was translucent. Cody looked off in another direction. He was fourteen years old—too big to be dragged on family outings any more and definitely too big for bows and arrows, unless of course you’d just leave the equipment to him and his friends, alone, and let them horse around or have themselves a contest or shatter windowpanes and streetlights for the hell of it. How did his father come up with these ideas? This was turning out to be even less successful than most. Cody’s mother, who was not the slightest bit athletic, picked dried flowers beside a fence. His little sister buttoned her sweater with chapped and bluish hands. His brother, Ezra, eleven years old, chewed a straw and hummed. He was missing his whistle, no doubt—a bamboo pipe, with six finger holes, on which he played tunes almost ceaselessly. He’d smuggled it along but their father had made him leave it in the car.
    At this moment, Cody’s two best friends were attending a movie:
Air Force
, with John Garfield and Faye Emerson. Cody would have given anything to be with them.
    “Now, your left arm goes like this,” his father said, positioning him. “You want to keep your wrist from getting stung, you see. And stand up straight. It was archery gave us our notions of proper posture; says so in the instruction book. Used to be that people slouched around any old how, all except the archers. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
    No, he didn’t know that. He stood like something made of clay while his father poked him here and prodded him there, molding him into shape. “In the olden days …” his father said.
    Cody let go of the bowstring.
Thwack
. The arrow hit the edge of the target, more sidewise than endwise, bounced off harmlessly and fell among the tree roots. “Now! What’d you go and do that for?” his father asked him. “Did I tell you to shoot yet? Did I?”
    “It slipped,” said