“All right,” my mom says, clicking a fingernail on the counter. “You had a good run at the Café, a couple summers. It was time. Now you’ll look for something else.”
“Uh yeah,” I say. “Won’t you?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She stretches the word to impossible lengths. “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan?”
“Yeah. What’s your strategy, what comes next?”
I tell her there is no plan, there is no strategy, there is no next.
“Well since you apparently have such a good handle on the situation and seem to have done quite a bit of thinking about, oh, little things like how you’re gonna live at school in the fall, Vincent, why don’t you go ahead and tell me what there is then?”
She stares at me the way only a disappointed mother can stare at her dipshit son, her only child, eyes searching with all the love and anger on earth for difficult answers to impossible questions that will never be asked as long as we live.