4

Our dishwasher leaves little specks on the dishes, dried-on white freckles. I scraped a rice scab off a fork with my thumbnail as I told Mom about the fire.

“I wondered what this was,” she said at last, picking a black fleck from my hair. She held it up on her forefinger. “The world’s smallest charcoal briquette,” she said. “Perfect for a flea’s barbecue.” She wiped it carefully on the corner of a napkin.

I was a little embarrassed. I would take a shower after dinner. “Dad’s paying a crew time and a half to unload the boxcar.”

“Derrick loves it.” She called him by his first name like this when she wanted to hold him up to the light mentally, turn him around like a fascinating specimen. Sometimes she looked different when she talked about him, a soft look in her eyes. “Forklifts, fire engines.”

“A spark probably got sucked up the ventilator,” I said.

I had a plate in front of me, lasagna covered with Saran Wrap, the hot food fogging the plastic. Anita said the microwave probably permeated the food with toxins from the plastic.

Mom was eating broccoli and French dressing, dipping the broccoli florets into the dressing, rolling them around, and chewing them slowly. She had lost thirty pounds over the last few months, although she still had dimples in her elbows when she put them on the table.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re thinking about doing research on my head.”

“Just wondering if you have any more black specks in your hair.” She got up and opened the refrigerator, pouring some sparkling water into her Betty Boop glass. Anita and I had shared the price of a Swiss-made Betty Boop wristwatch on one of Mom’s birthdays. The watch was water-resistant to one hundred feet, but Mom kept it on her dresser next to the photo of her parents.

“Where’s Anita?” I asked. What I meant was, Let’s not talk about my head. But I knew my mother didn’t want to take the news about the fire seriously. The time my grandfather was in the hospital with pneumonia my mother had cold sweats and a headache, the worst migraine of her life.

“She has that new job,” Mom said.

“I thought she was baby-sitting with Kyle,” I said. This was a little snotty of me because it was my theory that Anita took baby-sitting jobs so she could grope in the dark with Kyle while the toddlers lay deep in dreamland. I knew all about her new job, checking inventory for an office supply company, working evenings, correcting the mistakes the day people made.

“Kyle called,” Mom said.

“Wonderful.”

Mom looked at me. She does a lot of talking with her eyes. “We had a nice chat.”

“This couldn’t have been Kyle you talked to,” I said.

She gave me a lift of one eyebrow. I had the Saran Wrap off the plate, and it turned out I was hungry.

“Dad was afraid we were packing some of the nightstands wet,” I said.

“That’s not a very good idea,” she said.

“He had Jesse break open a couple of cartons before the truck came, and they looked okay.” Most of them looked okay. One had a weird little wrinkle from being packed in a carton too soon. That item would have to be sanded and refinished. One of the men in the shipping department had a problem, and Dad kept him employed because he felt responsible for the man’s family.

“You like that, don’t you?” Mom said. “You’re going to be talking about board feet and drawer pulls, just like Dad.”

My mother worked almost entirely at home, drawing pictures of fossil bones. She had an office upstairs all to herself. She had a magnifying glass on a crook-neck stand, and sat with a pair of tweezers and a fossil jaw or a tooth or skull and turned it over, nudging it with the tweezers, all the while her other hand was busy sketching front, back, and overhead views.

It’s surprising how many of the fossil parts are pieces from some animal’s head. Mom explained that this is because the lower jaw is the hardest bone in any body, and the cranial bones are almost as strong, and, of course, the teeth. Maybe this is why my concussion had a special impact on all of us, with a shelf full of fossilized head parts upstairs.

“We’re making a profit,” I said.

I liked saying we. For the first time in my life, my dad had let me into his world, even though it was only part-time, just for the summer, and my official job was assistant foreman, which meant I did what Jesse told me to do. Ziff Furniture had a big contract, fifteen hundred nightstands for a chain of motels headquartered in the City of Industry in Southern California.

“It’s wearing him out,” she said. “He comes home and falls asleep in front of the eleven o’clock news.”

She never put it so nakedly. Sometimes she acted as though the factory was a slightly unnecessary preoccupation of my dad’s, something he took up the way some husbands take up getting a pilot’s license. I knew how she really felt, how worried she was about my father, how concerned that he might get injured, or get another ulcer like the one that Dr. Pollock could still see on the X ray, the scar like a ghost.

“Why doesn’t Anita go back to work with Dad?”

“You know why,” said Mom.

I did know, but it was sometimes hard to draw Mom into the conversation at the angle I wanted. It was hard to get her to talk at all, sometimes. You could rush in, say hello, talk about the weather, show her the mail that had just arrived, ask if there was any news on TV, and all Mom would do in response is give a little wave, one finger, like a little puppet. Then she would say something like, “You like to hear about disaster, don’t you?” Sometimes it was as if she was an anthropologist. She was doing research on our family and, against the rules, had grown to love us.

She liked to be alone. If she was in her room drawing a fossil, it was a rule: Don’t talk if you can’t see me. It was the opposite of my dad, who had to be all over the place, talking to everyone, helping lift this, helping nail down that.

So I switched tactics, and decided to take Mom’s mind off Dad, because I knew that was what bothered her. “Did you go by the university today?”

“Sure,” she said. This was a habit she had picked up from Dad, and she gave a little laugh.

“So, are you going to be famous?”

She answered by moving one finger—this was a painful subject.

“Do you get to name the new species or not?”

“No news,” she said.

“Why does it take so long?”

She gave a shrug—not like most people’s, a shrug that expressed ignorance. She meant that the problem of whether or not she had discovered a new species of bay tree was an example of life’s complexity, a tiny fragment, proving the big problems of existence. It was also her way of telling me that she was trying not to let it bother her.

“Maybe Dad and I should go in and lean on someone.” I liked sounding like this, a tough guy. I was joking, but I knew if I wanted to threaten someone, I could.

Mom squinted at the broccoli stalk in her fingers, looking hard, like she had just discovered a new species of bug. “I don’t know how much more of this I can eat.”

“You look good,” I said encouragingly. It was true. I like to cheer people up, but I don’t believe in lying just to be nice.

She smiled. I had her full attention now, the way I had when Anita and I used to put on puppet shows for the family, Mom saying she wanted to see the part where Grandma punched the wolf in the snout one more time.

“You could go get the bay tree report,” she said, “but it’s in Anita’s room.”

I liked the challenge—could I slip into Anita’s room undetected? It posed a slight ethical problem: I knew Anita wouldn’t like me poking around in her room. She’d try to be polite about it, but my family made a big point of respecting each other’s privacy.

But I was just stalling, not wanting to talk about what was on my mind. I knew how Mom would react, even though she had a way of surprising me, of laughing at the same stupid movies I did. She didn’t usually mind when Anita and Dad got into one of their arguments. At times like those, Mom wasn’t pretending to be above it all. I think she really liked the sound of the two of them debating the rights of trees versus human beings, while I couldn’t stand hearing two people I loved getting furious about sequoias. It wasn’t that Mom liked bickering—I think she liked hearing us talk for the same reason people like to hear birds chirping.

So I dared myself a little. Go ahead, I urged myself. Tell her you want to play football.