Slide - Kyle Beachy [105]
“Work,” I said. “The point is to work.”
“Yes! Some days you carry and other days you mine and some days you drive the truck. You lay concrete. Because in times like these, hard work is the only thing that can ever save the world.”
“So why aren't you working now?”
She smiled. “The body also wants Recess.”
I had seen her smile before, along with these dents on her cheeks. The shape of a human face, all the similarities.
“There are three stations. This one is called Building. The other stations are Farming and Marketing, but we usually call Marketing the House. Farming is about the earth. You open it up and refill it and move it around. You water it and accept what it gives. At the House mainly what you're doing is selling. It's a different kind of work, but it's still work. That's the point. We rotate stations once a month. Marketing for a month, then Farming, then out here for Building. A month's just long enough to settle in. Then you switch and do something else.”
I moved my right hand down to the log just behind her and leaned forward enough that the inside of my arm touched the outside of hers. I leaned back because this was obviously too much but kept my hand where it was.
Are there guns here, on the premises?”
“Of course,” she said.
Are they being stockpiled?”
“This is the United States of America.”
We sat quietly on the fallen log and took in the movement of the workers. One time my father returned from a business trip with an ant farm, carefully pouring the sand, sending away for ants by mail. The point being: a child requires role models who are, above all, diligent. I looked again at Opal, and this time I was a little more sure than the last.
“It's not work alone,” she said. “It's why. Because they work out there in the world too, but it's always for someone else or some piece of paper. Here the work is for you. Six workdays a week and everyone has one full day of Recess built into their personal schedule. Everyone here is really great.”
I looked at her again and tried very hard not to know but knew anyway.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“I've been devoting a lot of focus to my hands. Examining them and thinking about them.” I raised them in front of me, palms away. “They're changing all the time. Growing and thickening or acquiring new scars. The hands I have at twenty-two are not the same hands I had at eleven. You ever seen an eleven-year-old boy's hands?”
“I might have,” she said.
“At eleven, hands are growing faster than any other part of a boy's body. When we're old, it's the nose and ears that keep growing. At eleven, though, hands are an indication of who the boy will turn into. There's that X-ray they do to know how tall you'll grow. That's all the nature side of the story. There is still nurture to consider.”
Her smile remained. I had completed the first step of the plan. Here she was, right next to me. The next steps were less clear. I could try lifting with my legs and carrying her back across the field, through the aisles of vines and past the building to my car. Drive her back to the dirt path and the porch, unlatch the screen door and complete the miracle.
“You're still his mother.”
“You know what I remember? On my wedding day, I remember all of us going into that room in the back and there was that piece of paper. I honestly thought they were joking. Then they gave me a pen and I understood, and I remember sitting at the table and crying, just bawling over the baby inside me and the wedding on the other side of the door and this piece of paper with the places to put our names. I see your eyes. You already made a decision about me. It's okay. I could tell you every detail and you still wouldn't understand. But I know who I am and I know my boy. I know he's okay. Nobody knows what's going to happen to anyone, but I know he's going to be okay. And so right now,