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

Cody.
    “Slipped!”
    “And anyhow, it couldn’t have stuck in the target. Not with that hard fat tree trunk behind it.”
    “It most certainly could have,” his father said. “Like always, you just had to jump on in. Impulsive. Had to have it your way. When are you going to start keeping a better rein on yourself?”
    Cody’s father (who never kept any sort of rein on himself whatsoever, as Cody’s mother constantly reminded him) lunged off toward the target, muttering and grabbing fistfuls of weed heads which he then threw away. Seeds and dry hulls spangled the air around him. “Willful boy; never listens. Don’t know why I bother.”
    Cody’s mother shaded her eyes and called, “Did he hit it?”
    “
No
, he didn’t hit it. How could he; I wasn’t even through explaining.”
    “People have been known to hit a target without a person explaining it beforehand,” Cody muttered.
    “What say?”
    “Let Ezra try,” Cody’s mother suggested.
    His father picked up the arrow and jammed it into the bull’s-eye, dead center. “Want to tell me it can’t stick?” he asked Cody. He pointed to the arrow, which stayed firm. “Look at that: steel-tipped. Of course it sticks. And spongy bark on the tree. I chose that tree. Of course it sticks. You could have lodged it in easy.”
    “Ha,” said Cody, kicking a clod of earth.
    “What say, son?”
    “Let Ezra try,” Pearl called again. “Beck? Let Ezra try.”
    Ezra was her favorite, her pet. The entire family knew it. Ezra looked embarrassed and switched the straw to the other side of his mouth. Beck waded back to them. “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes,” he said.
    “Ezra? See if you can hit it, honey,” Pearl called.
    Beck’s glance at Cody might have been sympathy, or else disgust. He pulled another arrow from the cardboard tube. “All right, Ezra, come on and try,” he said. “Just don’t get carried away like Cody here did.”
    Ezra came over, still nibbling his straw, and accepted thebow from Cody. Well, this would be a laugh. There was no one as clumsy as Ezra. When he took his stance he did it all wrong, he just
looked
all wrong, in some way you couldn’t put your finger on. His elbows jutted out, winglike; his floppy yellow hair feathered in his eyes. “Now, wait, now,” Beck kept saying. “What’s the trouble here?” He moved around realigning Ezra’s shoulders, adjusting his grip on the bow. Ezra stayed patient. In fact, he might have had his mind on something else altogether; it seemed his attention had been caught by a cloud formation over to the south. “Oh, well,” Beck said finally, giving up. “Let her fly, I guess, Ezra. Ezra?”
    Ezra’s fingers loosened on the string. The arrow sped in a straight, swift path, no arc to it at all. As if guided by an invisible thread—or worse, by the purest and most natural luck—it split the length of the arrow that Beck had already jammed in and it landed at the center of the bull’s-eye, quivering. There was a sharp, caught silence. Then Beck said, “Will you look at that.”
    “Why, Ezra,” Pearl said.
    “Ezra,” their sister Jenny cried. “Ezra, look what you did! What you went and did to that arrow!”
    Ezra took the straw from his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he told Beck. (He was so used to breaking things.)
    “Sorry?” said Beck.
    He seemed to be hunting the proper tone of voice. Then he found it. “Well, son,” he said, “this just goes to show that it pays to follow instructions. See there, Cody? See what happens? A bull’s-eye. I’ll be damned. If you’d listened close like Ezra did, and not gone off half-cocked …”
    He was moving toward the target as he spoke, oaring through the weeds, and Jenny was running to get there first. Cody couldn’t take his turn at shooting, therefore, although he was itching to. He was absolutely obligated to split that second arrow as Ezra had split the first. It was unthinkable not to. What were the odds