Funny Once Read Free Page B

disagreements?”
    “No, like . . .” He tipped his chin to look skyward. “Like instructions,” he finally settled on.
    Richard considered this. “Not exactly,” he said. “I mean, I think in words, and the words are about making decisions, sometimes, although sometimes I also just—”
    “No, not like that,” his son interrupted. “Like some other voice not your own.”
    “Sure. I hear people I know, or knew, when they said impor—”
    “No, no, no. Nobody you know, not you or a friend or a relative.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Isaac said not to tell anyone this.”
    “But you’re worried.”
    “Don’t tell Bonita.”
    Richard checked his blind spot and merged onto the 59. Rush hour was just about to kick in; the exchange from downtown was already filling, an army of headlights in the oncoming dusk. “Whatever you tell me, son, nobody will ever know I got it from you. OK?”
    “OK. So Isaac says that inside his head people are talking.”
    “He hears voices?”
    “I guess so.”
    “And what do they say?”
    “How would I know?”
    Fair enough, Richard thought. Was eleven the right age for schizophrenia to set in? His wife, master of all matters psychological, could have confirmed this. And more immediately relevant: was eleven the right age to scare his son with the idea of his best friend being schizophrenic? The problem with telling somebody something was that he wouldn’t later be able to unhear it.
    “Bonita and I will take Isaac to the doctor,” Richard promised. His wife had done this in the past, when the mysterious nervous stomach had first flared up; it was she who’d insisted to Bonita that the condition was serious. In Isaac, she had, perhaps, seen some of her own anxiousness, an insidious presence that Bonita did not recognize.
    “We should have never left the house,” Danny said, shaking his head.
    “If I had a nickel for every day I thought that,” Richard agreed.
     
    Suzanne was home when they arrived, filling the house with the sweet chemical smell of soft-serve. She often brought home “mistakes”—confections lacking the trademark swirl, or misunderstood orders, edible but wrong. Danny especially appreciated the Peanut Buster Parfait mistakes, his favorite. But Suzanne wasn’t due back until midnight tonight; Richard sighed, assuming she’d been fired. This day—would it never stop sending up trouble? But no, she hadn’t been fired. She was tearing up the house in search of her cell phone.
    “The last time I know I saw it was like two in the morning last night!” she shrieked from her bedroom. She’d thought it was in her backpack, she reported. Then she’d figured it had fallen out in the car. After an anxious hour at the Dairy Queen counter, she hadn’t been able to stand it any longer.
    “And it’s nowhere !” she wailed. Like Isaac, Suzanne panicked at problems that others might approach more casually. She had always been high-strung, particular about details, a self-critical perfectionist like her mother, unconvinced of her beauty, easily flustered. On her forehead a crease from premature concern; a skeptical tuck of her lip when she deflected a compliment.
    “She ruined our town,” Danny complained. “She kicked everything over.”
    “Have you called it?” Richard asked Suzanne, and received only a withering glance. The three of them spent the next half hour ransacking the place, reminding one another to try to think like Bonita, who might have found the phone earlier in the day and put it somewhere she thought logical. Long ago, Richard’s wife’s missing diaphragm had finally been located in a basket of bath toys; the parts of the food processor tucked away in the tools drawer. She was sometimes too thorough, Bonita; once she had rearranged all of the books in the house, after dusting the shelves, restoring them not in alphabetical order but by color and size: short red books all together, tall yellow ones side by side.