Slide - Kyle Beachy [84]
She pulled out her cell phone. “I'm meeting Luke for a coffee date up the street.”
I began nodding and kept nodding. Once she'd walked past me, I switched to her vacated seat so I had visual confirmation of her leaving the premises.
That night, I sat with my mother on the couch watching the six o'clock local news. She sipped from a glass of wine. The female anchor was one I recognized from growing up, except she must have had some sort of work done to her face. The man was the former sportscaster who transitioned to general news a couple years back. He took us live to on-the-scene coverage of a foiled abduction in Warrenton, about forty miles to our west. Police weren't yet releasing the name of the thirty-year-old suspect in custody. I thought back to my mother's flash of anger on that afternoon with the computer. Now she was completely still; aside from her eyes, open and glazed, she could have been sleeping. The female anchor introduced part three in their ongoing coverage of the approaching grand opening of the New West County Mall.
I moved from the couch to the breakfast counter and watched my father, who tonight for whatever reason was cooking. I tried not to read into this or see it as practice for bachelorhood. He had a dish towel draped over his left shoulder and an oven mitt on his right hand. It took opening three cabinets before he found the serving dish he wanted. As he cooked, he drank from his old law school beer stein.
I poured myself a glass of whiskey and went back to the couch. The weatherman mentioned a possible break in the heat but said not to hold our breath. From my seat I could see a stack of mail sitting on my father's desk. And what if one of the envelopes contained the pictures? What if they were accompanied by a note, a collage of mismatched letters cut from magazines, glued messily back into demands? Holding the remote with a straight arm, my mother began slowly climbing through the channels.
At dinner, my father and I spoke about baseball while my mother shook salt over her entire plate. The food was passable and I think better than she would have liked to admit. Now that I had my own scandal, every minute inside this house had become charged with implication, as if the rise in our calamitous prospects had given us something to look forward to. Was this instinctual, this secret desire for things to go wrong so we'd at least have guiding principles for what to do next? The three of us drank our alcohol. At any second it was all liable to crumble into a cloud of dust.
Much later, I found myself awake and made my way back downstairs. In the living room, I sat in my father's chair and listened to the wheels spinning in the shadows, the secret machinations whirring away.
It seemed my parents, likely distracted by their marital catastrophe, had forgotten to turn off one of the outdoor lights. I crossed the room for the switch but stopped when I saw my mother out there gardening. The clock read 2:30.
I stood at the window and watched. She was down on two knees as if genuflecting to some pagan feminine earth spirit. She was barefoot and wearing her purple nightgown, wristbands on each arm. Who knew what cruel circus of thought might possibly be going through her mind. She had a trowel in her hand and was stabbing into the soil to get at something that wouldn't budge. I stood until I couldn't watch anymore, then a little longer. I left the light on for her, though I doubted she really even needed it.
two
the heat had become something you wouldn't even discuss. It was three digits—what else was there to say? The city's old population was passing away at an alarming rate. As these tragedies grew more common, the news gradually eliminated their segments on heatstroke victims, interviews with surviving kin. In their place we had all variations of expert advising us on how to stay safe in what one network termed Radical, Perilous Heat and another, simply, The Danger Zone. How comforting the advice of these authorities, how nice to sit and listen to their