“Sure.”
“Ever since this business with the baby, she just hasn’t been right.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I opened the refrigerator. “You got any bottles of water I can put with Ethan’s lunch?”
Dad uttered an indignant “Ha!” I knew where this was going. I should have known better than to have asked. “Biggest scam in the world, bottled water. What comes out of the tap is good enough for anybody. This town’s water is fine, and I should know. Only suckers pay for it. Next thing you know, they’ll find a way to make you pay for air. Remember when you didn’t have to pay for TV? You just had an antenna, watched for nothing. Now you have to pay for cable. That’s the way to make money. Find a way to make people pay for something they’re getting now for nothing.”
Mom, oblivious to my father’s rant, said, “I think Marla’s spending too much time alone, that she needs to get out, do things to take her mind off what happened, to—”
“I said I’d do it, Mom.”
“I was just saying,” she said, the first hint of an edge entering her voice, “that it would be good if we all made an effort where she’s concerned.”
Dad, not taking his eyes off the screen, said, “It’s been ten months, Arlene. She’s gotta move on.”
Mom sighed. “Of course, Don, like that’s something you just get over. Walk it off, that’s your solution to everything.”
“She’s gone a bit crackers, if you ask me.” He looked up. “Is there more coffee?”
“I just said I made a fresh pot. Now who’s the one who isn’t listening?” Then, like an afterthought, she said to me, “When you get there, remember to just identify yourself. She always finds that helpful.”
“I know, Mom.”
? ? ?
“You seemed to get your cereal down okay,” I said to Ethan once we were in the car. Ethan was running behind—dawdling deliberately, I figured, hoping I’d believe he really was sick—so I offered to drop him off at school instead of making him walk.
“I guess,” he said.
“There something going on?”
He looked out his window at the passing street scene. “Nope.”
“Everything okay with your teacher?”
“Yup.”
“Everything okay with your friends?”
“I don’t have any friends,” he said, still not looking my way.
I didn’t have a ready answer for that. “I know it takes time, moving to a new school. But aren’t there some of the kids still around that you knew before we went to Boston?”
“Most of them are in a different class,” Ethan said. Then, with a hint of accusation in his voice: “If I hadn’t moved to Boston I’d probably still be in the same class with them.” Now he looked at me. “Can we move back there?”
That was a surprise. He wanted to return to a situation where I was rarely home at night? Where he hardly ever saw his grandparents?
“No, I don’t see that happening.”
Silence. A few seconds went by, then: “When are we going to have our own house?”
“I’ve gotta find a job first, pal.”
“You got totally screwed over.”
I shot him a look. He caught my eye, probably wanting to see whether I was shocked.
“Don’t use that kind of language,” I said. “You start talking like that around me, then you’ll forget and do it front of Nana.” His grandmother and grandfather had always been Nana and Poppa to him.
“That’s what Poppa said. He told Nana that you got screwed over. When they stopped making the newspaper just after you got there.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I did. But I wasn’t the only one. Everybody was fired. The reporters, the pressmen, everyone. But I’m looking for something. Anything.”
If you looked up “shame” in the dictionary, surely one definition should be: having to discuss your employment situation with your nine-year-old.
“I guess I didn’t like being with Mrs. Tanaka every night,” Ethan said. “But when I went to school in Boston, nobody . . .”
“Nobody what?”
“Nothin’.” He was silent another few seconds, and then said, “You know that box of old things Poppa has in the basement?”
“The entire basement is full of old things.” I almost added, Especially when my dad is down there.
“That box, a shoe box? That has stuff in it that was his dad’s? My great-grandfather? Like medals and ribbons and old watches and stuff like that?”
“Okay, yeah, I know the box you mean. What about it?”
“You think Poppa checks that box every day?”
I pulled the car over to the curb half a block down from the school. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Ethan dragged himself out of the car without saying good-bye and headed in the direction of the school like a dead man walking.