All Good Children - Catherine Austen [12]
I laugh. “I have to go home, Xavier. I’m suspended for saving your life.”
Xavier can deconstruct my personal mythology faster than I can fabricate it. “I don’t like you to fight,” he says. “I like you when you’re nice.”
Sometimes Xavier reminds me of Ally because he’s kind and innocent. But once in a while when he’s not speed-talking— because he looks so old and white and serious— he reminds me of my father. It saddens me and I don’t know why.
“Go to school before you’re late,” I tell him. “I can’t run with you today.”
“Okay. Bye, Max.” He sprints away, supremely fast and strong, out of sight in thirty seconds. If he could manage relationships and violence, I’d recruit him into football.
Stray children rush past me, trying to get to school on time. Older teens and adults ride to work on bikes. I watch them for a while. Then I have to admit that I have nowhere to go but home.
“You forgot to put the garbage out,” Mom says when she wakes at two o’clock.
I look up from my RIG. “Sorry.”
“We’ll have too much next week, Max. They raised the fine to forty dollars.”
I shrug. “I could dump it in the park.”
“That’s wrong.”
“It keeps people employed.”
She digs up a half smile. “Did you do anything at all today?”
“Nah. The only kids online are throwaways and Tyler Wilkins.”
“I meant anything useful.”
“Oh.” I look around the kitchen. My cereal bowl sticks to the counter, the flakes bloated and gummy in the bottom. My pasta bowl sits beside it, crusty with dried tomato. Mom opens the microwave and gasps like someone’s bunny exploded in there, when really it’s just a bit of spaghetti splatter. “I guess I could clean up,” I say.
She heats a cup of water in the dirty microwave and scoops in a spoon of coffee. She taps her foot as she stirs. “You only have a few minutes before you have to get Ally, so you might want to start cleaning now.” Tap, tap, tap. She cracks the whip, this mother of mine.
Mom is gone when I bring Ally home from school. The kitchen screen reads, Called in to work early. Be good.
“Want to go to the park?” I ask.
Ally runs to the cupboard and grabs a handful of sunflower seeds for Peanut, her squirrel friend. Mom used to feed peanuts to the squirrels when she was young and lived in the country. She has a lot of animal stories. Ally’s favorite is how one fall a bear and two cubs came into our grandparents’ orchard and ate apples off the ground. They swallowed three bushels in ten minutes, then had a snooze beneath a tree, the little ones flopped across the mama’s big belly. Eventually, when they awoke to eat more apples, my grandfather scared them away with a shotgun. The mama bear nudged her cubs, and they all loped off back to wherever they came from.
Ally loves that story. Mom never tells the ending, where the mama bear gets shot the next place they steal apples and her cubs are put in cages for the rest of their lives. Mom pretends the happy bear family went to a national forest and stayed there, safe and shining, for the rest of their days, telling stories in bear language about the afternoon they ate apples and dodged bullets.
I’d like to think that were true. I tell Ally it’s true. But it’s not true. Those bears are dead.
Ally would like to see a bear, but she makes do with whatever wildlife is at hand. She saves a worm from drowning in a puddle on the way to the park, picks it up and settles it on the grass, saying, “There you go,” like she helped an old lady across the street.
The park is just down the street from our apartment complex. It has a large playing field flanked by oaks and maples, two swing sets and a jungle gym fit for chin-ups. Two eight-year-olds, Zachary and Melbourne, use it as their gladiator arena. They throw sand, smash heads into monkey bars, knock down baby bystanders, kick and scream. Today Zach pushes Melbourne face-first off the jungle gym. Melbourne’s mother jumps from the bench with a hand raised like she’s going to swat Zachary. Zach’s mother jumps up like she’s going to swat Melbourne’s mother. Melbourne latches onto Zachary’s ankles and yanks him off the