Slide - Kyle Beachy [74]
“Yakuza,” she said.
“Which is why nobody would help. Stuart was seven. They kept him in a windowless room with only a small table and three chairs. They addressed him in English as if he were a full-grown man, speaking formally even as they made a fist of all but that one finger, then laid it across the table. He describes the pain as something he felt everywhere but his finger. Then they left him to wait in that room while his dad gathered the cash, arranged the exchange, and so on. They provided soup and bandages, very organized and businesslike. All told, he was gone for just under forty-eight hours.”
“Jesus, is that sexy,” she said, and I quickly gathered my papers and said goodbye.
The door from the basement opened into the Hoyne kitchen, a softer-hued and more sheep-covered reflection of my own mother's kitchen. There were sheep on oven mitts and towels and the small chalkboard by the phone. I stood lingering at the kitchen island across from Zoe's mother, my mother's dear friend. I assumed she had known long before me of Carla's displeasure, and I wanted to ask her about the progression as she saw it. When had she first noticed a change in my mother's behavior? Did Carla point, when pressed, to a small but ultimately devastating moment when she knew the marriage was finished? But all I could muster was a halfhearted question about the origin of her kitchen sheep.
“About six years ago we found that stool at an antique store in Herman. Then Derrick brought this home one day.” She reached both hands across the sink for a painted clay jar sitting in the win-dowsill. “From there it just kind of snowballed for us both. There are cookies in here if you'd like one.”
“Would you say the sheep have had a positive effect on your marriage? Life in general?”
She looked at me the way you might look at a three-legged dog. “Have a cookie, Potter. Go ahead.”
When I made it to our sheepless kitchen, Carla was in the middle of pouring herself a glass of wine. I sat at the counter and she was at the sink, no more than three feet away.
“Are you enjoying the tutoring?”
“To be honest I feel redundant down there. I'm basically a glorified egg timer.”
“I'm sure that's not the case.”
“There's just so much trust coming from every angle. To instruct another person, in basically anything, is to approach volatility So many things hang in so many states of balance.”
“I loved teaching. I really did. I could have taught forever.”
Her shoulders were pulled forward to accommodate her crossed arm and drinking posture, the glass held a few inches in front of her chest. Her upper arms were strong where they showed at blouse-sleeve ends. Her hair parted in the middle and spread outward like mist—thin, increasingly gray hair mist. Here was a woman I'd looked at so many times that I had no option but to take her for granted. A face too much like my own to register as anything else. Halfway-to-death woman, twice mother, future divorcée, looking down on me. I looked to the wine bottle on the counter briefly, then back into her face. Older female mirror of ancestral me.
“What's news from the garden?”
“It's not easy, son, figuring out how to be a mother once the normal duties are complete. Of course they keep going, I'll always be your mother. But once you were gone and schooled and now ready to begin your life.”
“Mom.”
“I'm sure you understand that none of this is easy. And that right now your father and I are in the middle of a very difficult time.”
“I have to be going in a minute.”
But going meant deciding where. I remained at the counter, sitting quietly and staring into the face of my mother. As she sipped her wine, I found myself blaming her for almost everything.
“I can see that you're upset. Of course. Your father's upset and I'm upset.”
“We're like a club.”
“Honey.”
I reached for the glass, took enough of a sip to finish it. She poured another.
“You and your father didn't make it to a