The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [6]
“Nope. Still don’t know.”
“Remember when your Daddy was sick in the VA hospital and you said you wanted to be a doctor? Or the time we went to Gettysburg and you saw the filmstrip about the medics and nurses in the Civil War?”
“Yeah.”
“You wanted to be a doctor then, too. Maybe it’s a sign.” She poured a little from her almost-empty whiskey bottle into the Waterford crystal glass she saved for these nights.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. I have a couple years to figure it out. Don’t worry.”
“Well, just so you know we’re counting on you, love. You’ll be the first in our family to really do something with your life! With your father so out of it he can barely form a sentence, and your own mother too daft to write a bloody shopping list.”
I flinched. My mother’s partial illiteracy had been a family secret ever since I could remember. We all helped. If it was a form to fill in at the store for a raffle, we filled it in. If it was a check to write for the gas man, we would write out the amount while on a long errand to “find her checkbook” and give it to her to sign it. She never read us stories or helped with our homework, but busied herself with things around the house. I guess we felt her guilt and never mentioned it. After learning that she’d been more of a slave than a student at the school she was sent to in England, I hadn’t questioned it so much. I figured it was something she would hide until she was dead.
“You don’t seem as excited about all the opportunities as you should, Saffron. There’s more to life than high school! Your future could save this family!”
“Well, you always said not to count my chickens, so I haven’t,” I said, and pictured myself knocking her off her chair with the butt of my musket. Knocking her out cold, so she would just shut up.
“But this is what you should be thinking about! I bet all the other students in your class could tell me what they might want to do in college. I mean, you must have had some thoughts about it by now. Maybe we distract you too much around here. Do you have everything you need?”
“Sure, Mom. I don’t need any more. I just want to be sure, that’s all. I’ll figure it out.” I was sewing her lips shut with sail thread.
“I don’t want to seem too upset when I tell you this, love,” she whispered, “but you’ve got to succeed. You just have to. Your father can’t keep up with everything, in his state. I can’t go getting a job after so many years being a housewife and raising you all. I need to know what you’re planning soon, so I can dream of a day I won’t worry like this, you know?” She drank the last of the whiskey in her glass.
“You’ll be the first one to know,” I answered, looking around the tattered kitchen to feel better about what she’d just said—to feel better about cutting her tongue out and feeding it to the circling sharks. “I think I’ll get back to the books, then,” I mumbled. I put my empty cup in the sink. She stayed seated in the dark, and I kissed her on top of her head on my way out because she looked like she needed it.
“You’re a good girl,” she said.
“Good night, Mom.”
I walked past my brother and father in the living room. They had reached some sort of agreement, which made them able to sit silently watching a baseball game on TV together. When I returned to my room, I closed my books, packed them up for the next day, and sat at my window in the dark, watching cars drive by on the suburban road outside. The view was crammed with houses in rows, each with two cars in the driveway and a porch light on.
I had already tried several times to find a simple answer to my mother’s question. She would never understand that I was born with enough knowledge to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams. She wouldn’t understand it even if I told her. As far as I could see, there was no way to convince anyone that picking up at eighteen and moving to the Caribbean to search for old buried treasure was anything but insane.
The thing was, I couldn’t go announcing that I wanted to be a doctor because, with my brains and my grades, there was a very real possibility