Dive (8 page)

Lyle’s always been a think-aheader.

Mom said she’d take you for the summer, but that was it. You’d have to go back once school started, she said.

How you got her mind changed is still not all the way clear in my understanding, but I bet it wasn’t too hard. Mom always had someone to keep her company. First Dad, then me, then Lyle, now you. A fair trade so long as I got to keep Lyle, I figured. All truth told, I didn’t mind hogging Lyle for myself. No more sharing.

Lyle wasn’t exactly as pleased. He fussed and fumed and even went over to Dogger’s, poking at him with questions about how long you’d been planning this, why didn’t you want to live with us, why wouldn’t you come home. I could have told him Dogger wouldn’t have the answers, at least not the ones Lyle was looking for.

Tell Dad to get off my case, you said to me, calling collect when you spared it the thought. Tell him to send my transcripts so I can enroll here, otherwise I won’t go to school at all.

He wants you home.

I’m here now. Gina’s going to phone him any day, soon as she gets around to it. There’s two bedrooms, so she’s still got her privacy. She told me it was okay. Besides, I met this amazing girl, Steph, and she’s teaching me windsurfing.

What about Daphne?

What about her?

There wasn’t anything to answer. I figured if you didn’t want Daphne, you didn’t want anyone, since Daphne was the person you tolerated the easiest. And of course, Mom came to your rescue. In a letter to Lyle, she said that living in such a small town all your life, she expected anyone sane would go mental.

Your mother is making a statement at Dustin’s expense, Lyle said as he handed me the letter. That was the first time I ever heard him say
your mother
in that bad, my-fault way.

But he transferred your school records. Both sides lose in a contest of stubbornness, Lyle explained, and Dustin will come home when he needs me.

Maybe Lyle really believed it, maybe he was just talking to persuade himself, but the fact that you’d be back soon wasn’t the kind of thing to question Lyle about. Not right then, anyway, when missing you was like mud on his heart.

“W
ELL, GET AN EYEFUL
of you!” Mom says when I meet her in the motel lobby, doing a sort of pop and spin away from the dingy glass sliding door where she’d been studying her reflection.

I go to hug her at the same time that she tosses me a small, silver-wrapped package, which I have to step back to catch.

“What’s this?”

“Something small. A nothing thing. You look really great, Ben.”

I shrug my shoulders but I feel not too bad, especially after my long shower and Mallory’s comb-out of my hair. She even knotted my tie a special Frenchy way.

Lyle hadn’t been as helpful through the time of me getting ready. He just kept going on about Mallory spending too much money, even though I told him it was her pleasure. I wished I could have tossed out that slippery French expression about how only the first step costs. That would have fixed him.

But when Mallory was done, Lyle softened up and said that he didn’t even recognize me. Which is how Mom is looking at me, too. I’m not one for liking the feel of church clothes, but when I saw myself in the mirror, it was something. I could have passed for a teenager.

“You can open that now, or anytime,” Mom says as we walk out to the parking lot.

But the present turns out to be weird, a bracelet made out of rope. A girl present. I look at Mom for a couple of seconds to see if she’s kidding, before I say thanks and slip my hand through.

“It’s soft,” I tell her. There’s not much else to say.

“It’s a friendship bracelet. Everyone out here wears them. It’s all natural, made out of hemp,” Mom explains. “You can make anything out of hemp. Shirts, anything. It’s wonderful.”

“Okay,” I say but then I tuck the bracelet behind my watch, out of sight. It doesn’t go with my sharp Frenchy look.

“Do Lyle and his lady friend have dinner plans?” Mom asks as we get in her car, a small buggy car, the kind she always likes to drive.

“Her name’s Mallory. Chinese takeout and pay-per-view,” I answer. “But first they were going back to the hospital to check on Dustin. He was asleep last time.”

“Lyle mentioned that you weren’t ready to deal with seeing him, earlier.”

“Hospitals are creepy,” I answer. “You have to be a hundred percent ready for them.”

“Hope you feel a hundred percent ready to see me,” Mom says, flashing me a kindergarten-teacher smile and turning on the radio, which is set on a good hits station.

Just this afternoon, I’d told Mallory how I didn’t care if I ever saw Mom again for the rest of my life. She’d called me a liar and she’d been right, because actually it’s not bad at all to be with Mom, sitting in the front passenger seat of her buggy car and listening to a good hits station. It reminds me of old times. We sing along with the music and of course Mom knows all the words.

The restaurant is far away and made out of glass and different from any other place I’ve been. First thing I see is a waterfall splashing into a pool right in the middle of the room. It makes people’s voices echo into a big waterlogged noise.

Mom is wearing a red dress with white dots on it, but other ladies are looking show-offish, too, in tiny skirts and tall heels. Everywhere are fat guys chewing steak or cigars, and the piano singer lady is practically topless. The whole restaurant could be described as super fancy in a rated-R way.

“Your eyes are saucers,” Mom says as we sit at our table. “You’ll have to do a better job not to stare.” She wriggles in her seat. “Isn’t this funsie?”

I try to recall if I ever heard Mom use that word
funsie
before, and I decide no.

The waiter brings us menus and Mom says, “A nice bottle of red to start, please.” I’d forgot about Mom and red wine. She used to drink it every night, even with fried-egg sandwiches.

When the wine comes, Mom toasts to how grown-up I look and says how I remind her of Dad.

I tell her that I can’t really remember what Dad looks like anymore. “I haven’t seen him since fourth grade,” I say.

“He’s been no kind of father.” Mom’s eyes get mean. “Old Frank. What a burnout.”

“He sends birthday cards with money in them,” I say. “And he calls me on Christmas.”

“Oh, throw that one at me.” Mom’s laugh is out of tune. “Last Christmas I was on a boat in the middle of nowhere, Ben. There weren’t any phones.”

“I wasn’t comparing you two,” I tell her. And I don’t think I was but maybe I was.

We go quiet as we read our menus.

The prices aren’t listed next to the food, so I have to guess what’s the most expensive. I figure it has to be the shark. I bet sharks are hard to catch. I also ask the waiter for some sweetbread to start, in case the shark tastes bad.

Mom barks out laughing when she hears my order and calls me a brave man. She orders a steak filet and takes a lot of time explaining to the waiter how she wants it cooked.

After the waiter leaves, she starts right in, telling me about the vet clinic and her scuba and how the weather here is good for her sinuses. I am sort of listening and also watching the restaurant people. It’s the kind of place where you might expect some gangsters to show up and start a shootout. In fact, there’s one guy at the table ahead of us who could pass for a gangster no problem. Could even be a gun in his side jacket pocket. Gangsters call it packing heat.

“And I counted, Ben,” Mom is saying. “Isn’t that awful? But it’s true. Eighteen months. It made me want to cry.”

“What?”

“That we’ve been apart for eighteen months. Ben! Haven’t you been listening to me?”

“Maybe I can come see you this summer,” I tell her. “Like if I have some free time after scouts camp, unless Lyle wants to rent that cabin upstate. Last year he did, I told you about it, right? How it was on a lake and we rented canoes? But if we don’t do that, I’ll come over here to visit you and Dustin. Okay?”

“Don’t put yourself out,” Mom says, sarcastic. She looks into her glass and swirls the wine around. “I’ve always imagined a special bond between us, a mother-and-son bond,” she tells the wine. “I gave birth to you, Ben. You can’t break that bond, no matter how long and far you stretch it. I’ve been good at not pressuring you to come out here. Very good, I’d say, since you’re mine by law. You don’t belong to Lyle. That’s why I want you to think hard when you reconsider living here with me, your own mother.”

I budge in my seat and don’t answer, although I want to ask her how could I reconsider something I never considered in the first place? But that would sound too smartmouth.

So instead I say, “Well, it was fun singing in the car and all.”

Mom’s eyes go a little moist then, and her hand reaches out to close around my fingers. “Tell me. Have you forgotten Before?” she asks. “When it was you and me, or even with Dad? There are days I miss, when you were little, when Frank knew how to have fun. Don’t you remember all the fun we had, us three?”

“I don’t go back that far,” I explain.

Then the waiter struts over with Mom’s salad and my sweetbread, except for it’s not sweetbread at all, it’s some kind of meat mash with gravy splattered on top.

“I didn’t ask for this,” I say to the waiter and Mom, whoever will listen.

“Sweetbreads, sir,” says the waiter, and he nods his head at the mash. The way he says
sir
sounds like he’s making fun of me. Then Mom tells me the disgusting truth that sweetbreads are another name for baby calf brains.

“Someone could have told me that when I ordered.” My voice isn’t so polite. Mom smiles away the waiter, then leans over the table candle, gritting her teeth so that her smile becomes a pretend of what it was. She looks like a jack-o’-lantern.

“Is this how Lyle’s raising you? Lord, at least you could try the food that you ordered and that I’m paying for.”

“There’s no way I’m eating baby cow brains. That’s obscene.”

The restaurant smoke is tingling my eyes, and the waterfall words and prinking piano are drowning the thoughts in my head. I squeeze my eyes shut against the smoke sting.

“You are unbelievable,” Mom says. “I take you to this beautiful restaurant and all you can do is sulk. You’re a real prince.”

“It’s not my fault,” I say.

“Oh, it’s mine, then? Are you blaming me? Go ahead and order something else, whatever you want. Double my bill. See if I care.”

“I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything from you.” A few people are looking over. “In fact, here. You can take your stupid bracelet back, too.” I pull it off my wrist and toss it into her salad, where it lands like a giant onion ring.

“Great, Ben. Congratulations. It only took you twenty minutes to ruin this evening for me.”

And I know she means it, too, and so I decide I’ll ruin it all the way.

I stand up from the table, push back my chair, throw my napkin over the brains, and tell her in as unrestricted a voice as I know that she better drive me back to the motel.

Right. This. Second.

I
TOLD MOM I DIDN’T
go back that far, but I’m lying. I remember too much of my Before, same as you. You used to talk about your Before, always plunk in the middle of some wrong time, like during our first Thanksgiving together.

Remember Before? you asked Lyle, just as him and Mom and you and me sat down at the dining room table. Remember Before, when my mom put horseradish in the mashed potatoes, how good that was? That was like the perfect way to have potatoes.

Lyle answered something easy on everyone, a nice thing about your mom’s cooking and then something else about how a real Thanksgiving always should have mashed potatoes, and weren’t we lucky to serve some up now?

The harm was done, though. I felt the ghost of your mom glooming in the shadow while we said grace and passed plates. You made me see into the Before room when it was just you, your mom, and Lyle. A perfect Thanksgiving.

I didn’t have those rooms in my Before. Mom and Dad were eater-outers, all the time, even Thanksgiving, when one year they found a seafood place that was open for an all-you-can-eat Thanksgiving special on beer-battered clams and shrimp. Back then, Mom’s hair was down to her waist, and she had to keep pushing it behind her ears to stop it from getting in the tartar sauce. They made me wear a bib even though I was too old, but then Dad tied on a bib, too, and Mom was laughing and saying, Frank, quit being a bozo, just this once?

Then Dad and Mom went out on the dance floor and didn’t come back. They danced and another guy was dancing with Mom too, and Dad would grab her away, and they’d dance over to the bar and refill their drinks while I sat at the table and chewed and watched them.

There were some little pink packets in a holder on the table, so I opened them and poured the white powder all over my shrimp. At the time, I didn’t know it was sugar substitute, all I knew was the powder tasted awful, a million worse times sweeter than sugar and it shriveled my tongue like salt on a slug. It’s a mystery to me why I kept on eating. There was no more water, so I drank some of the wine from the bottle, and that tasted awful too.

After my stomach turned sick, I tried to hide it by throwing up under the table. The waiter who found me there scooped me up and carried me into the restaurant kitchen and gave me a glass of seltzer and a roll.

Oh, Ben, Mom said after the waiter found her, too, and brought her into the kitchen to reclaim me. She picked me up from where I was sitting on the floor. She hugged me hard and kissed my head.

Oh, Ben, she whispered soft. Why do you always have to go and ruin Mommy’s fun?

T
HE DRIVE TO THE
motel is full of the radio music turned up too loud. Mom doesn’t talk to me but she does everything quick and huffy, even the way she taps her fingers to the music and snicks on and off the turn blinker.

Lyle answers the door wearing his pajamas. He is holding a Chinese food carton.

“You’re back early,” he says.

Mallory is in her pajamas too. She’s sitting on one of the beds and watching the television. Without turning her eyes away from the screen, she hands me a carton of Chinese along with a fork rolled into a napkin. “Fried rice,” she whispers.