TWENTY-TWO

The evening before the arraignment my mom sliced the tomatoes. She put the slices on the white china plate that had belonged to her grandmother.

Fine cracks covered this yellowish old plate, the sort of china so fine it’s translucent if you hold it up to the light. This was the first time my mother had eaten anything at home in several days, and it was good to have her there, the house shrinking to human size. It was a time like so many others, before my father was hurt. The rest of the neighborhood evaporated, and life was simple: plates, tablecloth, the two of us.

Mom sliced the tomatoes and then sat gazing into them, not digging in with a fork. She poked at the yellow tomato seeds with a tine, looking like someone who had heard about tomatoes but never actually seen one. I had not told her about the larva attack. I had pulled the tomato plants out of the tubs and thrust them into the compost heap under a tarp in a far corner of the garden.

I had kept a tomato for myself but chose to eat it like an apple, biting and sucking. It was delicious. A trickle of juice and seeds squirted out of the corners of my mouth, and ordinarily my mother would have said, “Napkin, Zachary,” or “Eat it in the kitchen,” not crabby but in charge.

Now she looked at me dabbing a seed off my chin and smiled, like she was happy at the sight in a weary way. It made me uneasy, this blessed-are-the-slobs attitude, and I wanted to goad her into complaining. I took a horse bite out of the tomato and sucked loudly. And she gave me a smile, a little tired, but real.

“I read him some Sherlock Holmes today,” she said. She was wearing her aunt’s cross, the cross that had survived the London blitz, and it looked delicate and old-fashioned glittering in the hollow of her neck.

I used a paper towel on my face. “Did he like that?”

“We used to read to each other, when we were first married.”

Stories about the early days of their marriage tended to trouble me in an undefined way, how happy they had been in the student housing, former army barracks, badly heated. The two of them were new to each other, unencumbered by a child. But it didn’t bother me now. She was just trying out a familiar subject, trying to maintain the quiet mood.

“I was going to cook some of my green beans tonight, but I don’t have quite enough,” I said. I had made dinner, Shake ’n Bake chicken and Minute Rice. I wasn’t proud of the cooking, but it was edible. The thighs and drumsticks turned out pretty good, all crispy.

“Sofia reads him the newspaper,” Mom said. “The Chronicle. Sits there with it up in front of her face. She reads him the sports page. She reads the baseball standings. She does it badly, ‘Mets one, Padres nothing,’ on and on, not using any verbs.” I could hear Mom’s old impatience with Sofia lingering, coloring the higher-road detachment Mom was trying to keep.

“Maybe Dad likes listening to her—she could read the want ads and he wouldn’t mind.”

I had begun avoiding these visits to my father. Even when I wasn’t working for Chief, I had reasons to stay home, weeds to pull, the front lawn to mow and then the back lawn, scattering nitrogen nutriment like handfuls of pink sand. You had to water thoroughly, so the chemical wouldn’t scald the green grass.

After dinner Mom decided to go on one of her cleaning binges. The way she cleans house makes it more of an Olympic event than a chore, and I joined in. I vacuumed the living room, using the thin plastic nozzle to chase down the all-but-imaginary dust mice under the sofa, while Mom shook out the Persian area rugs and sorted through magazines, one pile for recycling, the other to keep in a banker’s box in her home office.

I like vacuuming. When you suck up a paper clip there is that long, musical journey up the metal tube, a rattling tour of the cloth portion, into the lungs of the Electrolux. I didn’t do anything to spoil the matter-of-fact pleasure we were having, life the way it used to be, and even when she went through the closet for donations to Goodwill I helped her, knowing I could break the spell if I wanted to. I could argue that I wanted to keep the old Dodgers one-size-fits-all cap, or the foldable raincoat, used once long ago.

She huddled in the living room that night, talking into her portable phone, making notes. She wore one of her shiny bathrobes, dark blue silk, and she had washed her hair and wrapped her head up in a kind of turban, an old pink towel, frayed along the edges, that did not match her expensive robe.

I asked if could I get her anything, some warm milk with something in it, and she looked at me without saying anything, holding the little portable phone.

“You can’t stay up all night,” I said.

“They aren’t putting their best person on the case,” she said. “The district attorney’s office. I’ve been trying to reach everybody and God but no one answers their pagers on Sunday night. An assistant DA named something like Dingleberry is in charge of the case. I did find out that the person they arrested is an Oakland resident, twenty years old, and that he has a record. Lives with his parents. They searched the house and did not find the gun, probably some cheap throwaway pistol anyway. A ballistics test won’t be much help because the bullets are deformed and fragmented. You know who told me all that? The Tribune. It turns out when you need to know something you have to call a newspaper. Even the television stations aren’t much help on Sunday. You know all those all-news radio stations. Try to call one up and talk to a reporter.”

“We have to get some sleep.”

She didn’t even slow to take a breath. “At least one felony arrest, attempted robbery with grievous bodily harm, charges dropped. Insufficient evidence. They don’t even take a criminal to trial unless they have an absolutely perfect case.”

She stopped to consider what she was saying. My mom had always signed petitions and donated money on behalf of causes that were liberal, easing immigration laws, urging a more strict police review board. “You would think an assemblyman or state senator would have a staff on the weekends, someone you could call to put some pressure on the DA, but think again.”

She was quiet for a while, and then she said, “One of these days we have to paint the ceiling.”