Amp'd Read Free Page A

like birds.
    Heads turn and conversation stops. Dad’s oldest friend, Fred Weber, is frozen, a forkful of omelet poised to enter his mouth. Behind the counter Michelle’s attention is wrenched from the act of refilling a coffee mug, but it doesn’t matter because, I swear, the coffee itself has stopped pouring midstream. Even the kitchen roaches have petrified midscurry. The only movement in the room belongs to hastily averted eyes, as anything and everything—the food on the plates, the speckles in the Formica tabletops, the lint on George Jones’s sleeve, the faded painting on the wall (a boat in a Venice canal, which had adorned the wall unnoticed for decades until this moment)—suddenly demand attention.
    Dad slides into a booth and gestures for me to sit across from him and then disappears behind his newspaper. It would be very still and quiet here were it not for the ringing in my ears. By the time breakfast comes (me: mushroom egg-white omelet; Dad: Lumberjack Special, despite no previous lumberjacking experience), things have resumed some degree of normalcy. Michelle sprays the room with toothy smiles, and Mr. Weber, in full attorney mode, orates at a decibel made necessary by his failing hearing, as coffee flows and roaches scurry once more. Dad circulates among his neighbors and occasionally recalls me to them—“You remember Aaron”—and I nod from the table, waving with my good hand lest I appear double-amputeed.
    â€œYou look good,” Michelle flirts, as she once did with the handsome teenager I used to be, and I wish I could muster a flattering lie in return.
    â€œHe lost weight!” Mr. Weber shouts from his table, and as the room is now forced to ponder what an arm might weigh, silence reigns once more and George Jones returns his attention to the problematic lint on his sleeve.
    Michelle presents a rhetorical diversion—“More coffee?”—the space between offer and delivery too narrow for refusal. This is my third cup, and anyone here longer than I’ve been has surely suffered their fifth or sixth. It’s astounding our sleepy little hamlet isn’t rife with insomnia.
    Dad slips back into the booth across from me. “How was that omelet?”
    â€œWell, you know you can’t make one without breaking a few eggs.”
    â€œWhy does it cost more for egg whites? You’re getting less; they take out the yolks.”
    (That’s more like it, Dad.)
    â€œI wonder what they do with the yolks,” he ponders.
    â€œI think they just pour them over the Lumberjack Special.”
    Dad pokes at the nub of a sausage link on his plate as if trying to provoke a reaction. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
    â€œI’m going to finish my breakfast. Then, there will be lunch.”
    â€œI mean when you’re feeling fit again.”
    â€œI’m not sure ‘fit’ is what I’ll be feeling, but whatever it is, I’ll only be feeling it with one hand.”
    â€œYou planning on going back to that fancy high school?” he asks as the sausage squirms away from his fork.
    Any return to the life I knew seems so improbable, especially my previous position teaching social studies to the profoundly disinterested. Shaking off the discomfort of commanding a room’s attention had taken my entire first semester as a teacher, and I’m loath to return to face the scrutiny of teenaged eyes riveted to the place where my arm used to be. Or to manage its awkward opposite—the averted eyes and frozen smiles of fellow teachers cornered in the break room (not to mention the one-armed wrangling of coffee and stale doughnuts).
    â€œIt’s not fancy,” I deflect Dad’s notion. “We have the same challenges any high school faces in trying to prepare kids for a future in a hazardous world. We’re like NASA, training astronauts for a mission to Mars that we know can only