Labor Day Read Free Page B

Barry’s wheelchair was parked, and she was smoothing his hair down.
    I can’t believe you’d let your son make fun of Barry like this, Evelyn told my mother. She was packing up Barry’s stuff, collecting her cigarettes. I thought you were the one person who understood, she said.
    They were just playing, my mother said. No harm done. Henry’s a kind person, really.
    But Evelyn and Barry were already out the door.
    After that, we hardly ever saw the two of them anymore, which wasn’t such a loss in my opinion, except that I knew how lonely my mother was for a friend. After Evelyn, there was nobody.

     
    One time a kid in my class, Ryan, invited me for a sleepover. He was new in town and hadn’t figured out yet that I wasn’t somebody people had over to their houses, so I said yes. When his dad came to pick me up, I was all ready for a quick getaway, with my toothbrush and my underwear for the next day in a grocery bag.
    I think I should introduce myself to your parents first, Ryan’s dad said, when I started getting in the car. So they won’t worry.
    Parent, I said. It’s just my mom. And she’s OK about this already.
    I’ll just duck my head in and say hi, he said.
    I don’t know what she said, but when he came back out, he looked like he felt sorry for me.
    You can come over to our house anytime, son, he said to me. But that was the only time I ever did.
     
    S O IT WAS A BIG DEAL , bringing Frank home in the car with us this way. He was probably the first person we’d had over in a year. Possibly two.
    You’ll have to excuse the mess, my mother said, as we pulled into the driveway. We’ve been busy.
    I looked at her. Busy with what?
    She swung open the door. Joe the hamster was spinning in his wheel. On the kitchen table, a newspaper from several weeks back. Post-it notes taped to the furniture with Spanish words for things written in Sharpie: Mesa. Silla. Agua. Basura . Along with teaching herself the dulcimer, learning Spanish had been one of my mother’s projects planned to occupy us over the summer.She had started out back in June playing the tapes she got from the library. ¿Dónde está el baño? ¿Cuánto cuesta el hotel?
    The tapes were intended for travelers. What’s the point of this? I had asked her, wishing we could just turn on the radio, listen to music, instead. We weren’t going to any Spanish-speaking country that I knew of. Just getting to the supermarket every six weeks or so was an accomplishment.
    You never know what opportunities might lie ahead, she said.
    Now it turned out there was another way for new things to happen. You didn’t have to go someplace for the adventure. The adventure came to you.
    Inside our kitchen now, with its hopeful yellow walls and its one remaining working lightbulb, and last year’s magic ceramic seed-growing animal, a pig, whose crop of green sprouts had long since turned brown and dried up.
    Frank looked around slowly. He took in the room as if there was nothing unusual about coming into a kitchen in which a stack of fifty or sixty cans of Campbell’s tomato soup lined one wall, like a supermarket display in a ghost town, alongside an equally tall stack of boxes containing elbow macaroni, and jars of peanut butter, and bags of raisins. The footprints my mother had painted on the floor from last summer’s project of teaching me how to fox-trot and do the two-step were still visible. The idea was for me to put my feet over the foot patterns she’d stenciled on the floor, while she counted out the beats as my partner.
    It’s a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster.
    Nice place, Frank said. Homey. Mind if I sit down at the mesa ?
    What do you take in your coffee? she asked. She took hers black. Sometimes it seemed as if this was all she lived on. The soup and noodles were bought with me in mind.

    Frank studied the headline on the newspaper that sat there, though it was several weeks old.