What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [62]
But this was different. How much time would pass before people began to ask her questions directly? How thick would the silence be when she walked over to a table of customers and everyone politely gave their orders? Would it be better or worse if Dan were caught, arrested, and dragged back to Bakersfield? How would it look if he disappeared, Arlene still walking around free? The young waitresses would cross paths with one another in the back kitchen. The whole town would be talking about her. What kind of mother raises a son like that?
Sitting in the dark of her kitchen, Arlene wasn’t sure if the clarity was real, but she understood her mother now. With her hands on the teacup, she felt for the warmth, its measure, its certainty, the way she had felt the laugh rumble from Frederick’s chest, a discovery. She searched her own mind now in the same way, her own heart. What it took to sit in a courtroom when the entire world was against your son. What it took to sit there and know the silent judgment being cast upon you, the way you had to raise your head and walk in and out of the courtroom with conviction. Nothing you could do would bring back the victim everyone was grieving over. Nothing could be done in terms of real justice. Mercy wasn’t anywhere in the law. Neither was forgiveness. Or clemency. If it was, someone would have called out and said there were two mothers in the courtroom—why should they both suffer?
Could Arlene do that at least? Walk in and out of the café and face the day with her chin held high? Mrs. Watson. That woman. Her son. Long years awaited, whether or not she rose from the kitchen table, went back to bed, or remained sitting until dawn. Ahead were long years of being Mrs. Watson, with no one remembering Frederick, no one remembering she had a first name, even though it was on the red badge she pinned to her uniform every day. A waitress, but no one’s ex-wife. No one’s daughter, her family long gone. But everyone remembering she was the mother of that young man who had done that terrible thing.
She resolved to stay at the kitchen table until dawn. She resolved to stay until the police officer came with his inevitable questions. She resolved to point to the room at the back of the house and tell him what was in there. She resolved to tell him about what Dan had wanted her to do with the truck, how she had refused to do so because she was a mother. Arlene looked outside at the dark shape of the diesel truck and felt for the man inside. She had forced him to remain in the cold, huddled uncomfortably with his dog to pass the night, all because she hadn’t had the wherewithal to act like a woman first and not a mother, a person who cared about someone else’s well-being, not just her son’s.
Arlene thought about walking back out there and rapping on the door of the truck, showing the driver to one of the rooms and telling him with great apology that the fee would be waived. She decided against it, only because she was going to be facing life very soon—questions, suspicions, accusations—and these would be the last quiet hours she was going