1
“I don’t even like eggs,” David said.
“It’s not just the eggs,” said his grandmother.
“So what is it?” He no longer bothered to trim the surliness from his voice when speaking to her.
She thought for a moment. “Well, the activity. Participating.” Her fists gripped the steering wheel. Her face was locked straight ahead. She was a rotten and terrified driver. “Making friends.”
Make friends. Make friends. Same old garbage. “I don’t want to make friends.”
“Everybody needs friends.”
“Not me.”
“We all do, David. We’re all human.”
“I’m not.”
“No?”
“No.”
“What might you be, then?”
“A moose.”
He knew she wanted to give him a look, but she dared not take her eyes from the road. She settled for a sigh and a purse of the lips. “Now you’re just being silly.”
He let it hang there: “silly.” He said nothing. Unreplied to, the word would get bigger and bigger, filling the car, suffocating her, forcing her to open her mouth and take it back, swallow it. That would be her punishment. Maybe then she would turn around, take him home, let the Easter Egg hunt go on without him. It wasn’t even her idea anyway, it was his dad’s. They could tell him the hunt was called off, or they got there too late.
She opened the window on her side. She said, “Would you like your window open?”
He did not answer.
“David?”
“No.”
“Want the radio on?”
Question time. Try to get him to say yes.
“No.”
“Are you ever going to smile again?”
“No.”
“Are you a boy?”
“No.”
Drat. Tricked. Didn’t she know that tricks only made him hate her more? Wasn’t the trick his mother had played on him enough? More than enough? Did the world have to go on playing tricks on him?
Houses, street corners went by. This was all his life had been since April 29 of last year: a ride to somewhere he did not want to go.
They were stopping, pulling to the curb at the end of a line of cars. “We’ll have to walk from here. Looks like a good crowd,” she said, her voice all peachy cheery, like nothing had ever happened. She came around to his side. She opened the door. He stared straight ahead.
“David? Ready?”
“No.”
“They’re going to start in ten minutes.”
“Good for them.”
She reached in. She touched his shoulder. “Davey—”
He jerked away. “My name is David.”
He did not look up into her face, but he knew she was closing her eyes, trying to be patient. “Excuse me. David. You know what your father said.”
“Tell him we came and it was too crowded.”
She made a thin, wincing smile. “I don’t think so.”
He looked at her. “We could dye some eggs ourselves and say that’s what I found. I’ll dye them. You won’t have to do a thing.”
She closed her eyes, smiled painfully, shook her head.
David kicked the door and got out. His father had told him to go, but he hadn’t said anything about sticking to his grandmother. So he walked fast, zipping ahead of her. He knew she couldn’t catch up.
He walked past the sliding board and merry-go-round and the tables and benches and grills in the picnic area. And he did something that he often did at times like this. He pretended. He pretended he was doing this for his mother. He pretended she was not lying in a grave in a faraway state, but that she had awakened him the next morning, while it was still dark, just as she had promised, and they had gone out to the lake to see the sun come up, just as she had promised.