11
Scarlatta
A short time later, on the first of February, Gloria was driving to work when she stalled her car opposite a Hess station on Gallivan Boulevard in the middle of morning rush hour. She tried the ignition twice. When she didn’t get lucky, she reached out and turned off “Land of the Glass Pinecones” by Human Sexual Response so she could think. Behind her, cars were forcing their way into the other lane.
Chances were, she reasoned, the problem was in her left leg, the one that worked the clutch. She made a special mental effort and pushed the pedal all the way down to the floor. She tried the key again. The engine started. She took her foot off the clutch. Scarlatta started pulling forward.
A big girl in a bomber jacket zoomed around her in a Jeep Cherokee, yelling, “You stupid fucking retard, learn to fucking drive!”
Sealed inside her car, Gloria shouted, “Don’t yell at me! You have everything!”
She was only fifteen minutes late for work, but her trouble on the road suddenly hit her with its implications, and she got panicked. From her work computer, she looked up how to apply for disability in Massachusetts.
It was complicated and bureaucratic and would take quite a lot of time. They needed her work history for the past fifteen years, her educational background, and a medical release form for every doctor, hospital, therapist involved in her disease. There were ten pages of medical release forms.
She called the social worker, near tears, and said, “This thing is so enormous.”
Dawn Gillespie didn’t seem to share her aversion to paperwork. She spoke about the system as if she were explaining it, but it wasn’t an explanation, it was a burying in fine print. She sounded like human fine print. She knew so many rules it was amazing. The more she talked fine print, the more overwhelmed Gloria felt, but she was afraid to tell Dawn to be quiet because she was the only help she had.
“All I know is it isn’t safe for me to drive. I’m in trouble here. I shouldn’t have waited this long.”
The social worker kept talking forms until Gloria thanked her and, holding her head with her eyes shut, said goodbye and hung up the phone.
The next day, she asked Leonard to help her out by driving her to work. He dropped her off in Fields Corner and took her little red hatchback for the rest of the day, going wherever he went.
That evening at five o’clock when he was supposed to pick her up, he wasn’t there. Gloria couldn’t reach him on her cell. She called her son and had him try Leonard’s phone, but Corey couldn’t reach him either. She waited for an hour on the ramp outside her job. Finally she went to the nearest bus stop. She took the first bus that came. Then she noticed they were driving through unfamiliar streets. She got up to ask where they were going but was afraid of losing her balance and sat back down. Out the window, she recognized Blue Hill Avenue and, with difficulty, pressed the Stop Request button. As she was getting off, she asked if she could get to the Red Line from here. The driver told her no. It was very cold. A bus was waiting by the park. She hurried towards it, but it pulled away. She hurried to the next one. “Wait!” she called. The driver, a dreadlocked man, waited. After climbing aboard, she clutched the grab bar and asked him how she could get to the Red Line. “You’re a long way off,” he said, but promised to tell her when to disembark.
She took a seat near the front, behind a sign that showed a man in handcuffs. Assaulting the driver was punishable by a $10,000 fine. Except for two fat girls in tight jeans and gold mascara sitting across from Gloria who gave off an air of secret jubilation, the other passengers maintained a strict reserve. The bus swung downhill onto a forested road sparsely dotted with old houses. The driver let her off at an outdoor train platform. She was confused. “Get on the train,” people told her. The train operator, a thin fellow, leaned out of his chair and asked if she was getting on.
“But I’m looking for the Red Line.”
“That’s where I’m going. Get on.”
She took a seat right near him.
“I’ve never taken this train before.”
“This is the oldest subway in the United States,” the operator said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m driving history.” He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck, his name was Andrew, and he had been working for the MBTA for eight years, working nights. Originally he was from Connecticut. Now he lived in Brockton.
“Do you like it?”
“Nah, Brockton’s too far out. I’m a city guy,” Andrew said.
“Me too. I’m a city girl.”
“Where do you stay at?”
“Quincy. I’m not happy about it. I moved a while ago. For the wrong reasons.”
“I know Quincy. Upper-class poor, lower-class rich.”
“That’s a good description!”
“That’s what I call it. Everybody up here is getting pushed down there, and everybody down there is getting pushed up here.” They were rolling by clumps of black trees, a nightscape in which it was impossible to make out any landmarks. “Gentrification, so-called. Prices are going out of control.”
“Oh my God, they are.”
“A dozen eggs used to be two seventy-five. Now it’s three forty-nine. That’s a high percentage increase. You see it with the consumer price index. Milk, eggs, staples.”
“I used to go to Whole Foods, the one at Alewife? It’s like the original store; it was called Bread & Circus back then. This was back in 1997, to tell you how old I am! And you could eat natural, whole, healthy…food. Like you’re supposed to. And it wasn’t your whole paycheck. It wasn’t a gourmet grocery store like it is now.”
“They know how to pick your dollars apart.”
“They do!”
Without warning, they pulled up at the terminal stop in Ashmont and her conversation ended.
“Good luck, Andrew,” she told him as she dismounted. “Keep on enjoying history.”
“Be safe.”
“I’m Gloria, by the way.”
“Be easy, Gloria.”
At Ashmont, she had to wait for the inbound train to JFK before she could catch the outbound train to Quincy, and then she had to wait for another bus to take her out to Sea Street. She didn’t make it home till nine. Corey ran to the door when he heard her coming. The trip had exhausted her, and the next day there was still no sign of Leonard or her car. She took mass transit to work, and she had another fall and, this time, broke her cell phone and cut her chin.
Leonard reappeared several days later, on a Friday, and returned their car. He and Gloria talked all evening as if nothing was amiss. Corey waited until after his mother was asleep. He closed her door and asked Leonard for a private word. Corey led him to the kitchen. The window, which Leonard habitually raised, was open, letting in chilling damp air. In the black outside, Corey saw a mass of moving reeds and heard them soughing in the wind. Knowing what he was about to say, he experienced physical fear symptoms. Their intensity surprised him. He felt his body shaking.
“Basically,” he said to his father, “I wanted to talk to you about the car. About how you took it.”
The fear—call it stage fright—eased once he had started talking. He said, “I value knowing you. I’m glad you’ve been coming to see us. I think my mother’s glad too—she’s been lonely. What she’s going through is lonely above all. We’re alone out here. But you took her car, and she fell. I was mad over that. I’m still mad—I’m actually shaking, and I thought it was because I was afraid of talking to you, but now I think it’s because I’m angry. I never told you how angry I was. But I want to get over it, so we can work together. You’re the one who told me that we want the same thing. So why would you disappear like that? There’re things I don’t understand about you—like how you live, these girlfriends, all this stuff. Or these things you’ve been telling me at your job. I mean, we need you, don’t get me wrong. I’m asking you for help. I don’t even care about your private life. I just want to see all of us pulling together to help my mother. That’s all I wanted to say. I’m done.”
Leonard suggested they step outside.
“I’ll get my coat.”
They left the house. It was after midnight. Leonard began leading him down the shore road.
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s see what’s down here,” Leonard said, choosing their direction: towards a spit of land that jutted out into the water. The homes had boats in the yards, propellers sticking out from under tarps. Security lights shone on the shingled houses, the watercraft. The night sky was drizzling. Leonard walked him down a concrete staircase to the beach, among the stones and broken asphalt. The black seawater came up to the edge of where they were standing. The water was calm and lay in front of them like a parking lot with the light rain falling on it. The dull black surface raced away from their feet to various masses of black, which were islands, and merged with the night sky, which was full of clouds. Industrial lights smoldered in the misty distance of the half-urban landscape.
“I never knew you liked the ocean.”
“It’s great. Let’s go farther.”
“I can’t see anything down here.”
“I thought you wanted to talk to me.”
“I do. I’m coming. What are we going to do about my mom?”
“There’s nothing anyone can do. We’re all living with a death sentence.”
“I know, I know…I know she’s going to die. But we have to help her…face death. I mean, what are we going to do between here and there? What about her job?”
“Massachusetts has disability for people who can’t work.”
“She’s had trouble with that.”
“She has trouble with everything.”
“I don’t see it that way. She raised me by herself, Leonard.”
“She’s a real success.”
“Why do you hate her?”
Leonard spun around and snatched Corey by the coat.
“Hey, let’s get something straight: You don’t know anything.”
“Okay.”
“You know nothing. Nothing. About anything.”
“All right. Jesus.”
“Don’t you Jesus me. Who the fuck are you? Some kid, some punk kid—from Quincy. Some little fucking idiot from Quincy, Mass.”
“All right. All right already. I didn’t mean to anger you.” Corey pretended to laugh. The sight of the nearest houses, which looked empty in the night, filled him with abandonment.
“A dummy. So shut the fuck up. You want to learn from me? You want to get close to me? Lesson number one: Shut the fuck up.”
Corey spent the rest of the night in his bedroom with the door locked and his arm over his face. At three in the morning, he heard his mother use the toilet through his wall. Sometime later, he heard the click of the living room lamp going off and the futon settling when Leonard put down his book and went to sleep. At dawn, Corey opened his bedroom door and emerged already fully dressed in coat and jeans. The living room was steeping in the dirty gray light of another day. Carrying his boots, he crept through the house in sock feet, past Leonard’s sleeping form, and went outside.
It was six a.m. and the beach was dead and gray. He tied his boots looking at the spot where his father had yelled at him the night before, on the other side of the concrete barrier which was supposed to keep the sea from drowning the road in a storm.
On his way uphill, over the rooftops, he saw the sky going from bluish gray to a pale copper color out on the horizon. He bought an egg sandwich at the DB Mart and waited in the parking lot until it was time for work. Pickup trucks came and went. The doorbell chimed and people came out of the store with coffees. The day got warmer and the ocean chill dropped away. A gold light spread over the asphalt. A white F-150 drove by, but it wasn’t Tom. At seven, he went down the side street, lined by trees, to the job site, all the branches having turned gold on one side and gray on the other in the strong horizontal light from the east.
There was a thirty-yard dumpster in front of the house and plaster-dust-covered guys were carrying Rubbermaid trash cans up from the basement, full of broken wood and drywall. They walked into the dumpster, dropped their loads of debris and walked out, smoke billowing from their barrels. Hardly anyone else was there.
Corey asked if they needed him. They lent him a pair of leather gloves. He went down into the basement. There was a tiny window letting in warm white sunlight. He tried to lift a barrel that had been loaded with fragments of a demolished wall.
“That one’s a monster. You’re not gonna get that one. Take less. Don’t blow your back out.”
Carrying an armload of wood and plaster trash, he dropped a wedge of sheetrock on the basement stairs and an already fully burdened guy running up behind him caught it and put it on his own pile without breaking stride. They went out into the daylight, nails poking through their sweatshirts, and dumped their armloads in the dumpster.
At nine o’clock they rested. The smell of marijuana reached them.
“Smell that?” one guy said. He went off to check it out. Corey and the other guy stayed behind. It was silent in the sun. In the lull in work, Corey’s depression grew.
The first guy came back. “It’s some dude blazing out by the porta-shitters.”
They ambled back to the basement, and Corey followed.
He asked if they’d seen the boss.
“I don’t think he’s here.”
Corey said he wanted to look for the boss.
The guys shrugged.
Corey went around the site looking for Blecic’s truck. He encountered Dave Dunbar coming towards him from the port-a-johns.
“Hey. You seen Blecic?”
“Not me, chief.” Dunbar got in his subcompact Nissan.
“Where you going?”
“The hardware store.”
“Come on, man,” said Corey. “You can tell me. I’m cool.”
“I’m breakin’ out, kid. Gonna set it off. The boss ain’t here. He doesn’t know what’s going on. His head’s up his ass. I’ve been putting sixty hours on my time; I worked like twenty last week. We’re all doing it.” He started his car. “What’s up, dude? You wanna jump in? Come on.”
Corey got in with Dunbar and they drove away.
They drove around Quincy picking up other passengers—two kids from high school and a local man, a hairstylist. At midday they were burning down the Southern Artery. Corey was sitting in the back with the boys in the now-crowded Nissan. The hairstylist sat up front with Dunbar. Dunbar drove bending forward with his head over the steering wheel, looking out the windshield at the traffic converging on him from all sides—converging on him as, simultaneously, he stepped on the gas even harder and shot out ahead of it. And the car swooped forward—and then he had to downshift, engine braking—because there was a slow guy rattling along ahead of him, a pickup in the center lane with PVC and copper pipes sticking out the back over the tailgate like lances. The boys in his backseat, knees and shoulders squished together, rocked forward. Dunbar darted sideways, changing lanes, then crawled past the Chevy, the driver a stolid forward-looking shadow wearing a baseball cap above them, passive-aggressively accelerating at long last now that they were going to pass him.
They drove on, the windshield filled with blue sky and sun, an ad for Jordan Marsh on the radio—Dunbar punching the radio off, driving with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, feeling his pockets, hitting the glove box open, digging for a lighter, and the man, Anthony, giving him one while all the boys in the back asked each other, “You got a lighter?” and had to admit they didn’t have one: “Not me. Sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“I bet you smoke dicks,” Anthony the hairstylist said.
Dave torched his cigarette, smoke filled the speeding car and the boys pretended they didn’t mind it.
“How youse mad dogs doing?”
Good, they all said.
He willed the car forward, ooching it, imparting it momentum as if it were a becalmed sailing craft instead of a speeding missile on the highway, exited and shot through an intersection, looking both ways, the traffic on either side closing like shark’s jaws that just missed him as he squirted out ahead of it—through the ubiquitous landscape of Greater Boston: a CVS on one corner, a sub shop on the other, and if you looked far enough in the distance, a church spire sticking up over the houses. He was six feet tall, Irish but olive-skinned, had his hair cut high and tight—like he was entering the Army, though he never would; he loved smoking weed too much and he wouldn’t have wanted to leave his town, or his friends, or his girlfriend, or his job, even though he said they all sucked, which was why he got hammered. And he jammed the accelerator and sped them down a lane of clapboard houses, and parked. And all the guys, all these young, growing males, uncramped themselves and climbed out of Dave’s tiny car.
They went into the house. There was a carpet and a kitchenette and a couch facing a bare white wall with an outline, a reverse shadow, a lighter rectangle where the TV had once been, and the cable coming out of the wall with nothing attached to it, just the silver connector and that tiny poking wire. A few other older guys were there with their hats on backwards, and the boys were on their guard. They shook hands all around. One of the men, a tall fellow in a faded sweatshirt, loose around his red wrists, and carpenter’s jeans with a loop for a hammer, had an edge. When Corey introduced himself, the guy said, “You said hello to me already.”
“No, not me. That was him.”
“Yeah you did. It was you.”
A battered metal toolbox rested at his feet in battered leather boots, glints of steel toe caps showing through the worn-out leather, the steel battered and bent too. He was drinking a beer from a case of beer on the kitchen counter and spreading waves of approach-me-at-your-peril.
But Dave went through the house, pulling off his shirt as he went, and went up to him bare-chested and clasped his hand and grabbed a beer of his own. He made sure all the boys got beers. He had a Bud Man tattooed on his olive chest, in garish blue and red.
Dave grabbed the radio and ran down the stairs, the music descending with him—Journey, Aerosmith, Foreigner—the guys following him down, and the boys trooping after the guys. Down they went into the basement: a room like the one they’d just left only smaller, more confined, no natural light, and no carpet or couch: a concrete floor, load-bearing pillars, a breaker box cocooned in spiderwebs, and a weight bench in the center of the space. A pile of rusted iron weights in unusual denominations—no doubt culled from some antique powerlifting gym hidden somewhere strange and forgotten like in a church basement when it was being gutted to make way for a more modern facility.
Dave set the tunes on the sill of a bricked-over window, Boston singing “More Than a Feeling.” The guys arrived with six-packs under their arms and set them down, clinking, on the basement floor.
The hairdresser, Anthony, took off his parka and revealed a set of enormous blotchy red-tanned arms. He had black curly hair and wore a black silky jersey and heavy, shiny, black, satiny tracksuit trousers and big white Jordans and a gold chain. He put on a thick leather weightlifting belt and a pair of black leather fingerless gloves with Velcro straps and mesh backs. He spent a long time putting his gloves on, adjusting and readjusting them. He was unlikable but immensely strong. He lay down under the barbell and pumped it up and down as a warm-up—twenty times with no sign of fatigue. Then Dave changed places with him, took a swig of his beer, hit himself in the chest, on the Bud Man tattoo, and could barely lift it.
The men lifted weights and drank in the basement for several hours. The hairdresser got mad at something one of the boys said, and got up off the bench red-faced and shouted, “I’ve taken shits bigger than you!” He walked slowly out of the room with his swollen red bulbous inflamed-looking arms out to his sides. When he was gone, Dave said, “That’s what ’roids’ll do to you,” and a mood of approval went through the room. The boys looked at each other with vindication. The carpenter, lounging on a broken lawn chair, drinking his tenth beer, cracked the barest smile, and sank back into scowling at his raw red hands.
The boys got on the bar when it was their turn. “Youse can do whatever you want,” said Dave. “I work different body parts every day. You got your shoulders, your arms, don’t forget your trapezius—they’re over here—do your shrugs. Your farmer’s carry. Ask Anthony. He’s the expert—if he isn’t being a hard-on. He does his body parts six days a week. He spends one whole day on shoulders.”
“He’s a fucking weightlifting pussy,” the carpenter said.
Anthony stalked back into the basement, and now he put nearly all the weight they had on the bar, and pressed it up and down three times, his body almost bursting—held in by the wide leather weight belt strapped around his waist—a human torpedo arched on the bench.
“Keep talking,” he said, breathing hard. “Spoken like a drunk.”
“Come to my job. See if you could do my job. Let me see you try paving. And I will keep talking. All you can do is drink wheatgrass.”
“Keep talking.”
“Fairy wheatgrass.”
The hairdresser made a lunge at the carpenter, who dived up out of his chair. The fight got broken up with a lot of pushing and shouting. The carpenter put his finger in the hairdresser’s face and said, “I’ll kill you”—but then he slammed his way upstairs and took his toolbox and jumped in his truck and left.
The almost-fight provided fodder for discussion for a while. The day went on, got boring. The two high school boys wanted to take the commuter rail home and they did. But Corey didn’t want to go home. He kept lifting weights long after everyone had left the basement. Between sets, he drank until he got dizzy-drunk. Upstairs, Dave and his friends were playing some version of hockey in the house. Dave came down to check on him, saw all his empties and said, “Are you hammered? I work out hammered all the time. It’s great so you don’t feel the pain.”
The sun went down. They put their shirts back on and went out to the train tracks in the night and kept drinking. A new crew of guys, new strangers and friends, the train tracks and the gravel ground in the moonlight. The art of speaking when spoken to, but not too much. Not mouthy but not shy. One of Dave’s friends asked Corey where he lived, and Corey told him Quincy.
“A lotta ginzos up by you?”
“What’s that, Italian?”
“Yeah.”
“My father’s Italian.”
“Sorry!”
“It’s okay. I’m not sure if I like him.”
The guys loved that. “You’re not sure you like him!”
“Yeah. He just started hanging around my house after sixteen years.”
“I didn’t like my father,” the hairdresser said. “I told him he could suck my dick.”
Corey got drunk enough to tell Dave “My mother’s dying” and clasp his hand. Dave said, “I gotta get this kid home.”
But Anthony the hairdresser said, “Let him sleep on the couch.” Dave’s girlfriend was coming to see him. Whispered adult plans were in the works, cars and keys borrowed, strategies agreed on, a ten-dollar loan for a bottle of wine, a trip to the package store—a swirl of intrigues, all the more subtle to Corey because he was so staggeringly drunk. They walked him inside and he fell asleep on the couch in the TV-less room with the cable coiled on the floor like a root pulled out of the ground.
At two in the morning, he woke up and saw Dave and another man standing toe-to-toe under the watery fluorescent light of the kitchen, slugging each other in the arms and chests—heavy, meaty, smacking, bruising bare-fisted blows that thudded through their feet into the floor. It wasn’t a real fight, but it was a rough and painful form of entertainment.
A little later, Corey woke up again in Dave’s car, and Dave was driving him home. All around them, he saw a black forest, the car rushing under the trees, spotlighting with its headlights the white houses with their dead-looking windows—behind every mailbox and fence, the dead-black background. Dave scrupulously drove him to his door on Sea Street. The sight of his own house distressed him, a black box against the waving blue sea of the marsh.
“Are you straight? Can you get inside? Okay, be good,” Dave said. “Don’t tell your mother I let you drink.” And he drove off.
Late on Sunday morning, Corey stood in the doorway of his room and held his head.
His mother looked up and asked if he was okay.
He just had a headache.
“Are you sure?”
Were they alone? he asked.
They were, she said. What did he want to ask her?
He approached her with his eyes full of emotion. “Mom, were you planning to abort me?”
“How could he have said anything?”
“Mom, I’m sorry. It’s okay. I can put it in context. You didn’t know me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I never would have. Oh, Corey. I rue the day.”
“Why is he even here?”
“We need him, Corey. What are we going to do when I can’t work?”
“He doesn’t do anything. We don’t need him.”
“Maybe we don’t,” she said.
In the afternoon, Corey and Gloria sat alone together and looked through a catalogue of prosthetics and assistive devices. He proposed getting her a knob for the wheel of the car, which he could have easily installed. But the stick shift would still be a problem. They thought of trading in her hatchback and getting an automatic, but in the end, they wouldn’t do that either.
At three o’clock, he asked for his mother’s car keys. He wanted to change her oil. She sat inside reading on the futon while he worked outside. It was cold, the sky was blue and the wind was blowing. Leonard’s Mercury wasn’t there. Corey fetched a container for the dirty oil and a three-eighths wrench and a new Fram filter and set them on the ground. There was brine in the air. A brownish-green crab shell lay on the roadside, tangled up in seaweed.
He popped his mother’s hood, unscrewed the engine cap, stuck his finger in the brass threaded hole, swept his finger in a circle and smelled the hot black oil. It soaked in and brought out the whorls of his fingerprints. He climbed under the car and fit the three-eighths wrench to the nut, gave it a twist, unscrewed it with his fingers—and the oil jumped out, a smooth, heavy, hot, dense liquid. It leaped across the back of his hand and poured into the receptacle.
Standing, he stuck his hand inside the hot sharp-edged engine and tried to unscrew the old filter. The oil made his hand slip. He rubbed his hands with a rag and tried again, made a mighty effort, a moment of isometric tension, gritting his teeth, straining as hard as he could, angry, his arm in the car and his eyes staring at his house. But the heat had welded the metal screw threads. He had to use the filter wrench—a snarelike clamp. A quick mental review of which way he was turning—righty tighty, lefty loosey—and he took the filter off.
He had three quarts of golden black thirty-weight oil. He stuck his finger in the clean oil and rubbed it around the rubber rim seal of the new Fram filter and attached it to the engine, twisting it tight, but not too tight, doing it with care. With a rag, he cleaned the nut and threaded it carefully back into the hole in the bottom of the engine case, plugging it, and tightened it with the three-eighths wrench, cautious of stripping it. Using a funnel, he poured the clean oil into the crankcase.
It was advisable to run the engine for a minute. He got behind the wheel and started her car and listened to it run. The engine made a looping hum. He was convinced something had been done to it, that it had been damaged in some way.
Where had it been driven?
He drove to a garage and dumped the used oil in a steel drum, went home and gave her her keys back. “These are yours and yours alone,” he said. Did she want him to hold them for her? Did she want him to keep them safe?
Leonard never offered to drive Gloria again. Nor did he leave. Instead, starting around the second week in February, he consolidated his presence in their house, staying with them every night, as if he truly lived there, exactly like a real member of their family. Now it was a family in which no one talked. The house rang with an inaudible dog whistle of tension. Gloria and Leonard pretended not to know each other. She would wait for Leonard to finish in the kitchen and then, without a word, go in and make her dinner.
Corey stopped talking to Leonard completely. From now on when he saw his father, he put his earbuds in and listened to Theory of a Deadman with the volume cranked.
Rather than going home and facing Leonard after school, Corey began wandering in town, looking to hang with Dunbar or his friends. There were a lot of them. Sometimes they met at a house in Quincy; other times Corey caught a ride to Weymouth. On workdays, he cleaved to Dunbar at Blecic’s job site, which meant they often absconded from the job together and submitted phony hours. Dave’s friends worked in factories, in warehouses as order pickers or forklift drivers, as sandwich makers or delivery drivers. Some were in jail. The paver was doing ninety days. Someone had pulled a knife on him at a party, so he had broken a bottle and used it as a weapon: “He was in a jam, so he jammed,” Dave said. The hairdresser, Anthony, said that standing up for “The Cause” meant standing up for a fellow white boy if you were in jail with him. It was better to fight and lose than to be a punk or bitch.
The guys at Dunbar’s house took off their shirts and put on hockey gloves and punched each other in the chest. Corey wrestled on the floor with a kid his size and lost. He crowded in with the guys and watched a video of a cage fight on Dunbar’s cell phone and, when one of the fighters caught a kick to the head and collapsed, joined the others hooting, “Aw shit! He got knocked the fuck out! He got merked!”
In the ideal of standing up to anyone no matter what the consequences, Corey heard the echo of Joan, who had followed the same principle. He saw himself living up to her code of valor and winning her approval wherever she was.
Gloria came home with a cane. Her doctor had made her understand she couldn’t drive. She was taking the T to work. She gave her car keys back to Corey.
Tonight, she was in the kitchen, making wild rice for dinner; Corey was lingering at her side, the automotive key ring in his hand. The house was tensely silent, Leonard in the other room. She moved around unsteadily, her shoulders rounded, neck thrust forward, face downcast—an Albrecht Dürer face, the German draftsman and painter of the Middle Ages—all well-defined bones—thin nose, cheekbones, jaw, a healing cut under the point of her chin; her forehead swelling slightly, the sign of a mind holding on to things it was trying not to say.
Her bad gait was plainly visible to Corey. Something was obviously wrong. A spasticity in her calves made her want to stand up on her toes. She was as unsteady as if she were walking on stilts; her knees didn’t bend. To open and shut the cupboard, turn the knobs of stove and sink, fill the pot with water, and so on, she was using her hands like hooks or mitts with bones in them. Corey was reminded of the plastic claw they used at Family Dollar to grasp a pack of toilet paper from an upper shelf—a clumsy device with scant leverage. She hadn’t told him what her commute was like, or what her job was like once she got to work, but he only had to look at her to guess.
She had been holding a Charlie Card to the scanner with both hands, sometimes dropping it on the concrete floor of the station while people behind her said, “Just go through!” Bus drivers waited for her to climb their stairs with her cane hooked on her arm, her weak hands gripping the stainless aluminum handrails, arms shaking as she pulled herself up, and they waited while she got her card out and held it to the reader until it beeped, and they waited while she went back and looked for a seat—and everyone else was waiting too. And then the slow acceleration towards Fields Corner.
He stood by his mother’s shoulder at the burner. There was a pat of butter floating on the boiling water, dissolving into a yellow skin. He offered to take the wooden spoon. She let him stir. The bubbling of the water and the stirring of the spoon masked the sound of their voices from reaching the other room. Corey began to talk.
He said he wanted to drive her to work. She said that was out of the question; he’d have to miss school. He said he wanted to quit school and work full-time; he could support them. “You’re too young,” she said. He insisted that he wasn’t. She didn’t want that for him. He said he wanted it himself. He could support her and they could live alone.
Gloria lowered her voice to say, “Corey, I don’t want you missing a single day of school because of this hateful disease.”
“But what are we going to do?” he asked.
“We’re going to have to get along with your father.”
They were in the house alone, in separate quadrants of the house; Corey was in his room. One minute, the house was silent; the next, he heard a crash. He started running for the kitchen before he even knew what he had heard. His mother’s scream was preceded by a time delay. She must have been drawing breath. The scream began hitting his ears when he was halfway between his bedroom and the kitchen. Everything was knocked over—a table, a chair, a carton of orange juice lying sideways, silverware, a glass, his mother. She was bare-legged wearing shorts, the kind of shorts she wore to exercise. Her mouth was open and her eyes were squeezed shut in the attitude of someone who had fallen from a great height, far higher than anything in this room, and broken her back.
He dropped down and cupped her head. “Are you okay? What’s broken?” He couldn’t understand her she was crying so hard. “I hit my head,” she sobbed. He held her head. “Mom Mom Mom.” Her back was soaked in orange juice.
“I tried to jump!” she screamed in anguish. “I tried to jump one last time.”