We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [67]
“That’s not the kind of thing you have to announce, Kevin,” I said tightly. I’d had that mashed beans and banana side dish at the Norfolk before catching the plane.
“How about Junior’s?” you proposed. “It’s on the way, and they’re kid-friendly.”
It wasn’t like you to fail to consider that I’d been in transit from Nairobi for fifteen hours, so I might be a little tired, bloated from the flight, overfed with airline Danishes and cheddar packets, and less than in the mood for a loud, camp, brightly lit hash house whose sole redeeming feature was cheesecake. I’d privately hoped that you’d have found a sitter and met my plane alone, to sweep me off to a quiet drink where I could bashfully reveal my turned maternal leaf. In other words, I wanted to get away from Kevin the better to confide to you how very much more time I planned to spend with him.
“Fine,” I said faintly. “Kevin, either eat those cheese thingies or I’ll put them away. Don’t crumble them all over the truck.”
“Kids are messy, Eva!” you said merrily. “Loosen up!”
Kevin shot me a crafty orange smile and fisted a doodle into my lap.
At the restaurant, Kevin scorned the booster seat as for babies. Since clearly parenthood turns you overnight into an insufferable prig, I lectured, “ALL right, Kevin. But remember: You only get to sit like an adult if you act like one.”
“NYEE nyee, nyeh nyeh. Nyeh nyeh-nyee-nyeh: Nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyee nyeh nyeh.” With waltzing mockery, he had captured my stern cadence and preachy inflection with such perfect pitch that he might have a future singing covers as a lounge singer.
“Cut it out, Kevin.” I tried to sound offhand.
“Nye-nye nyee, nye nye!”
I turned to you. “How long has this been going on?”
“Nyeh nyeh nyeh NYEE nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh?”
“A month? It’s a phase. He’ll grow out of it.”
“Nyeh nyeh? Nyeh-nyeh nyeee. Nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh-nyeh.”
“I can’t wait,” I said, increasingly loath to let anything out of my mouth, lest it come parroting back to me in nyeh-nyeh-speak.
You wanted to order Kevin onion rings, and I objected that he must have been eating salty crap all afternoon. “Look,” you said. “Like you, I’m grateful when he eats anything. Maybe he’s craving some trace element, like iodine. Trust nature, I say.”
“Translation: You like eaty-whizzes and curly-munchies, too, and you’ve been bonding over snack food. Order him a hamburger patty. He needs some protein.”
When our waitress read back our order, Kevin nye-nye-ed throughout; “NYEE-nyeh nyeh-nyeh, nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh-nyeeeh” apparently translates “garden salad, house dressing on the side.”
“What a cute little boy,” she said, glancing with desperation at the wall clock.
When his patty came, Kevin retrieved the tall, faceted saltcellar with huge pour-holes and covered the beef with salt until it looked like Mount Kilimanjaro after a recent snow. Disgusted, I reached over with a table knife to scrape it off, but you held my arm. “Why can’t you let anything with this little guy be fun, or funny?” you chided quietly. “The salt thing is a phase too, and he’ll grow out of it too, and later we’ll tell him about it when he’s older and it’ll make him feel he had plenty of quirky personality even when he was a little kid. It’s life. It’s good life.”
“I doubt Kevin’s going to have a hard time finding quirks.” Although the sense of maternal mission that had powered me through my last fortnight was fast abating, I had made myself a promise, Kevin a promise on arrival, implicitly you one as well. I took a breath. “Franklin, I made a major decision while I was gone.”
With the classic timing of dining out, our waitress arrived with my salad and your cheesecake. Her feet gritted on the lino. Kevin had emptied the saltcellar onto the floor.
“That lady has poop on her face.” Kevin was pointing at the birthmark on our waitress’s left cheek, three inches across and roughly the shape of Angola. She’d slathered beige concealer over the big brown blotch, but most of the makeup