Monkey Island Read Free

red, one arm held out, her palm turned up as though she was offering him something.
    His mother completed her course and found a job in a Wall Street office, where she worked what she called the graveyard shift, from eleven to seven in the morning. “All alone up there on the thirty-fifth floor with machines humming and clicking away,” she said. “I sort of like it.” When she came home, Clay was usually on his way to school, not the one he’d been going to since they’d had to move into the hotel.
    The flush faded away from his mother’s face, and her voice lost its sharpness. The rent was paid, and some early evenings the three of them even went out to supper at a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, where they had gone often when his father was still an art director. But something was different.
    Whatever it was, it always began around suppertime. They would all be in the kitchen, his father looking down at the stove at something he’d cooked—he did most of the cooking now—and his mother might be at the sink, washing lettuce. Whatever it was didn’t show itself in words. It was hidden somewhere in the hot silence.
    Clay tried to ignore it while he was eating supper. But he thought about it in school. “You’re not paying attention, Clay,” his homeroom teacher said. “You’re daydreaming.”
    He wasn’t daydreaming, he wanted to protest. He was thinking so hard his forehead ached.
    One night loud voices from the living room woke him. His mother and father were fighting.
    â€œHow can we?” his father suddenly shouted. “I might never get work again except for piddling temporary jobs. Another baby? You’re crazy!”
    â€œIt’s too late now,” his mother cried out. “We’ll have to find a way.”
    Clay pulled the covers over his head, then reached out and pushed the pillow on top of the covers.
    The next day, his father met him after school and took him to the zoo. It was rainy, and most of the animals had retreated into the sheltered areas of their cages. Only a tiger paced behind the bars, panting, its golden eyes passing over their faces as though they were stones, its great paws slapping the wet cement floor of its cage.
    â€œI think the tiger hates being in there,” his father said.
    â€œIt gets fed,” Clay said.
    â€œThat’s true. Just enough food so it will have the energy to pace.”
    Clay did not feel his father was speaking to him; he might even have forgotten that Clay was there, standing next to him.
    Clay’s mother was put on an earlier shift for a week, so Mr. Garrity and Clay were alone in the kitchen in the evening. At first Clay felt relieved by a kind of calm silence between them as they both went about fixing their supper. But when his father didn’t say a word while they were eating their hamburgers and baked potatoes, Clay made up a story about a lost dog following him home, because he wanted to hear a voice, even if it was just his own.
    His father kept his head bowed over his plate. Was he listening? At last Clay said, “Daddy? Could you say something?”
    His father stood up so quickly his chair fell to the floor with a bang. He came quickly to Clay’s side and crouched down and put his arms around him tightly. Clay could barely breathe. “I’m sorry,” his father said over and over again.
    Later, when he leaned down to kiss Clay goodnight before turning off the light on the table next to the bed, he took a five dollar bill from his jacket pocket and tucked it under the pillow. “That’s for you to buy something nice tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe that ring puzzle you liked that we saw yesterday in the stationery store.”
    Stationery store. Those were the last words he heard from his father. He was gone the next morning, and he didn’t come back.
    People came to the apartment—a colleague of his father’s from