An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [34]
"Good afternoon," my mother said, coming in from offstage, as she had the previous night. I turned to face her. She also had a big beer in her hand, and unlike the night before, today I could see her clearly, could see clearly that she had changed since I'd seen her last. For one, she was pretty. I remembered her face being severe and impressive; it could scare you into admiring it, but it wasn't what you'd call pretty. She had always been one of those harsh, clear-eyed New England beauties whose scarily blue peepers always seemed to be looking through the disappointment that was you and back to her own clear-eyed Puritan kin. But now there was a softness to her face, not as though she'd gained weight, but as though she and her face had called some sort of truce and were at ease: her blue eyes seemed at home over her nose, which hung like an awning over her mouth, which was smiling at me. My mother's name is Elizabeth, and she had always seemed like an Elizabeth; but now she seemed like a Beth. As Elizabeth, she had always seemed to be what she was ― a stern high school English teacher ― but as Beth, she seemed something kinder and gentler. A nurse, maybe, an especially pretty one.
"You look like Nurse Beth," I told her.
"Ha," she said, girlishly tucking her hair ― it was black as it had always been, and long, too ― behind her ears. My mother went over to my father, took the empty beer can out of his hand, opened a new one, and placed it in the gnarled cup holder of his right hand. He said something garbled and multisyllabic, which I took to mean, Thank you.
"Should you be giving him another beer?" I asked. My mother didn't respond in facial expression or word, and so I added, "Because of his stroke."
"Did you hear that, Bradley?" my mother said to my father, her smile getting even softer, full of some private pleasure. "I shouldn't get you another beer because you've had a stroke."
My father didn't say anything back, but he shot her a look and she met it, the look, halfway, and it remained there in the room, like another son, another human being with some mysterious, shifting relationship to the two adult human beings that had made it. Because maybe this is what it means to be a son. No matter how old you are, you are always a step behind the two people who made you, the two people who always know something that you need to know, too ― like, for instance, how my mother had known that Anne Marie had kicked me out of the house, or even that there was an Anne Marie, or a house.
"Last night you said that my wife had kicked me out of the house," I said. "How did you know that?"
"What?" my mother said loudly, because my father had begun drinking the beer, slurping it heroically and at top volume, and I had to shout the question ― "How did you know that my wife had kicked me out?" ― so she could hear it over the soggy racket of my father's imbibing.
"Oh, Sam," my mother said, "it's an old story."
"An old story," I repeated, thinking now of what the judge had said to me at my sentencing about good stories and bad stories, and for the first time in years I recognized that stories were everywhere and all-important. There were all those letters stashed away in the shoe box, all those people who wanted me to burn down those writers' homes because of the stories the writers had told; there was the story that Thomas Coleman told Anne Marie that made her kick me out; there were stories that the bond analysts had told about themselves in their memoirs, if they'd even written them (one had, sort of, but I didn't know that yet);