Slide - Kyle Beachy [91]
“You're fired, don't come back, get the hell home and explain this to your daddy. I bet you he's surprised you made it this long.”
He walked back into the office and latched the door behind him. What he'd gotten totally wrong was that this was hardly a blip on the radar of shit that would surprise my father. I looked to the sun overhead, burning through haze. Christ, but I was thirsty.
My mother didn't ask why I wasn't at work. After breakfast, I stayed at the counter and read the entire local newspaper from front to back, something I'd never done. My mother moved about the house with a sense of purpose I envied terribly. I went to sit in the rarely used sunroom and found several pieces of luggage on the floor. I nudged one with my foot and it was heavy and full. I could hear Carla moving about the house, going from the kitchen to the basement, then to sit in Richard's office. I moved to the kitchen and tried to listen to her phone conversation but couldn't make it out. By the time I thought to sit on the living-room couch, she had finished talking and begun watering the houseplants. When she was finished with that, she came and stood between me and television.
“How are you for clothing, son?”
“I could probably use some socks.”
She handed me the keys and I backed us out of the driveway. I concentrated on traffic, braked early, and accelerated gradually. We parked in a huge concrete structure and took a colored flyer on our way to remind us which level. The walking bridge set us at roughly the midsection on the Galleria's top floor, next to Brookstone. Above us, latticework of glass and painted steel gave the false impression of natural lighting. My mother and I began walking.
Even now, years since this place had been the center of my social universe, a residual unease plagued this visit with my mother, a violation of its adolescent sanctity It felt crowded for a weekday afternoon, full of laughing families and pods of cool teenagers. The marble floor was polished to a sheen only slightly less vibrant than the store windows. I sped to walk at my mother's side, proving to us both that I wasn't ashamed to be with her. We passed Eddie Bauer, then the Gap, and she asked if I needed any sweaters. She stopped walking before I could answer.
“One hundred degrees outside and I'm asking about sweaters. How completely silly.”
When we made it to the mall's end, an escalator took us down a level. On the ground floor now, we walked in silence, pace determined. There was a lot of mall to cover. We walked among pairs of women pushing baby strollers, wearing colorful shoes and form-fitting workout fabric.
“How come no outreach to the poor and elderly today?”
“The program directors ask us not to volunteer more than twice a week. They have concerns about people getting too attached.”
“Them attached or you attached?”
“Oh. I think it works both ways,” she said. “Doesn't it?”
Soon we saw the atrium, a great yawning chasm. The escalators were here to help, to make clear the appropriate movement. We rode down to the food court.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Not really. But should we eat? I feel like we're here for a reason. Maybe you're hungry?”
“I could use a coffee.”
We checked what movies were playing, then took another escalator back to the first floor. Falling back a step, I saw something in my mother's shoulders. There, in the way her arms pinned the purse to her side. I had up until now thought of it as weariness, lack of full satisfaction. But this was more active than that, real sadness. Blocking out what I could of the consumer chatter around us, I focused on her feet and heard it in each shuffle and pat of her steps. Sadness; my mother besotted by sadness. And yet moving nonetheless, lugging her body like some burden, her burden like some natural part of her body. She had adapted to the sadness and made a series of adjustments to accommodate its presence. Over time.