We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [144]
“I am trying to understand him.” My ferocity must have carried; on the other side of the partition, Celia started to whimper. “I wish you would!”
“That’s right, go tend to Celia,” you muttered as I got up to leave. “Go dry Celia’s eyes and pat Celia’s pretty gold hair and do Celia’s homework for her, since God forbid she should learn to do one miserable assignment by herself. Our son was just picked up by the cops for something he didn’t do, and he’s pretty shaken up, but never mind, because Celia needs her milk and cookies.”
“That’s right,” I returned. “Because one of our children is spelling farm animals, while another of our children is pitching bricks at oncoming headlights. It’s about time you learned to tell the difference.”
I was really angry about that night, and I wasted most of my subsequent workday at AWAP mumbling to myself about how I could have married a complete fool. I’m sorry. And this was despicable of me, but I never told you what I stumbled across late that afternoon. Maybe I was just embarrassed, or too proud.
So beside myself with fury and frustration that I was getting nothing done, I took the CEO’s prerogative of cutting out early. When I got back and relieved Celia’s baby-sitter Robert, I heard voices down the hall. It seems that the stupid, pliant, self-abasing worm didn’t even have the good sense to make himself scarce for a few days after showing up at our door with the police, because I recognized the nasal, querulous pule emitting from Kevin’s nightmarishly tidy bedroom. Unusually, the door was ajar; but then I wasn’t expected home for another two hours. When I headed toward the bathroom I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, but—oh, I guess I was eavesdropping. The urge to listen at that door had been upon me the night before and had lingered.
“Hey, you see that cop’s fat butt hanging out his pants?” Lenny was reminiscing. “Working man’s smile grinning ear-to-ear! I bet if that guy’d taken a dump while he was running, it would’ve cleared his belt!”
Kevin did not seem to be joining in with Lenny’s cackle. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Lucky for you I got Mr. Plastic off my back. But you should have heard the scene in here, Pugh. Straight out of Dawson’s Creek. Fucking nauseating. Thought I’d bust into tears before a commercial break from our sponsors.”
“Hey, I hear you! Like, with those cops dude, you were so smooth dude, I thought that fat fuck was going to take you to some little room and kick the shit out of you, ’cause you were driving him like, fucking insane! Sir, I really must terribly protest, sir, that it was me— ”
“It was I, you grammatical retard. And just remember, chump, you owe me one.”
“Sure, bro. I owe you big-time. You took the heat like some superhero, like—like you was Jesus!”
“I’m serious, pal. This one’s gonna cost you,” said Kevin. “’Cause your low-rent stunt could do my reputation some serious damage. I got standards. Everybody knows I got standards. I saved your ass this time, but don’t expect a sequel, like, ‘Ass-Save II.’ I don’t like associating myself with this shit. Rocks over an overpass. It’s fucking trite, man. It’s got no class at all, it’s fucking trite.”
Eva
MARCH 3, 2001
Dear Franklin,
You’ve put it together: I felt ashamed of my false accusations, and that’s the real reason I decided to ask Kevin on that mother-son outing, just the two of us. You thought it was a weird idea, and, when you commended so heartily that Kevin and I should do that sort of thing more often, I knew you didn’t like it—especially once you added that barb about how we’d better avoid any pedestrian overpasses, “Since, you know, Kev would have an uncontrollable urge to throw whole Barcaloungers onto the road.”
I was nervous about approaching him but pushed myself, thinking, there’s no point in moaning about how your adolescent never talks to you if you never talk to him. And I reasoned that the trip to Vietnam the summer before last had backfired for being overkill, three solid weeks of close familial quarters when at