An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [58]
Except then, finally, I was remembered; I was recognized and I learned some useful information when I was. I'd almost made it back through the farmers' market when I ran into Sandy Richards, a tenth-grade biology teacher at Pioneer Regional High School, which was where my mother taught eleventh-grade English. She walked right toward me, and I couldn't avoid her. I also couldn't avoid noticing Sandy had aged the way my mother had not: her face was a map of wrinkles and blotches; she had begun the once-a-week home-permanent routine in order to obscure her thinning hair; and most damning, she was wearing the sort of sweat clothes people wear, not when they exercise, but when they can't feel comfortable in anything else.
"Sam?" she said. "Sam Pulsifer?"
"That's me, Mrs. Richards," I admitted.
"I almost didn't recognize you," she said.
"Almost," I said.
"How have you been?"
"I've been OK," I told her. After that, there was a huge, oppressive silence surrounding us, a silence made up of all the past we couldn't speak of and all the present and future made unspeakable by the past. It was awkward. And in order to break that awkward silence, Sandy Richards said something that ended up being an important fact I learned that day.
"We've missed your mother," she said.
"You have?"
"I wish she was still at school," Sandy said. "We miss her" ― and here her background in biology betrayed her and she searched long and hard for just the right word to describe what about my mother she missed ― "spirit," she finally said.
"I bet," I said. "Now, I can't remember. How long have you missed it?"
"It must be about six years now," Sandy said.
"That's right," I said. "It must be." And then, "You know, my mother has always been a little foggy on the details of her retirement."
"Retirement. . . ," Sandy said, clearly unnerved by the conversation's turn. Her blotches and liver spots seemed to grow and throb with her unease. "Well, I suppose she was asked to retire, sort of."
"Oh."
"Because of her drinking," she said.
"Right," I said. "Her drinking."
"It's a disease," Sandy said. "Treatment, not punishment, that's my motto."
"That's a very good motto to have," I told her.
After that, we were surrounded by another silence ― a more rewarding one for me, although I can't speak for Sandy. My mother had been forcibly retired from her job six years ago but hadn't told me, had lied to me about going to work, and not just on a Saturday, either. Why? Had she told my father? Where did my mother go every day? And how could I find out?
"Sam?" Sandy said. "Hello?" She had clearly been talking to me while I'd been having these thoughts, and I heard her voice from far away, then followed it until I left my world and returned to hers.
"Hello," I said. "I'm back."
"Yes, well, I have to go," Sandy said, and then she shook her canvas tote bag full of organic vegetables, as though the vegetables were late for an appointment. "Please give my best to your mother."
I will," I said. "I most definitely will."
11
It was a triumphant walk from the farmers' market to my parents' house that afternoon. I had learned something, something large, but it wasn't the learning something, in itself, that was so satisfying: it was that I would get to go home, tell my mother that I knew the truth about her "work," and then say, Aha! It was the Aha! I was so looking forward to, so much so that I momentarily forgot my plan to go back to Camelot, to force myself and my apologies and confessions and further apologies upon Anne Marie and the kids until they took me back. The prospect of saying, Aha!