The politician was a good public speaker, warm and spontaneous, and he was loath to stick to a stump speech as he toured the fellowship halls and multipurpose rooms and middle school gymnasiums of the 6th Congressional District—a cause for constant, low-level alarm among his small staff. But the stakes for this election were low, relatively; the district hadn’t gone blue since the Carter administration, and no one expected that to change anytime soon.
No, this campaign was a testing of the waters. He was 42, handsome—actually handsome, not just politician-handsome—charismatic, sharp. He’d amassed a respectable pile of money building a regional chain of outdoor supply stores, which gave him some credit with both the gun enthusiasts and the granola eaters, and he had a pretty wife and two young, blonde daughters who looked like they’d been born to wear navy dresses in front of a billowing American flag. He was a rising star, scrutinized under a high-powered lens. He had a consultant, imported from D.C., who was being paid, it was rumored, by Buffy Sherman, and it was this consultant who kept saying, “Give him some leash. The old rules don’t apply anymore.”
They gave him some leash. And so far, so good. No big gaffes, no embarrassing video uploads. He had a Biden-ish tendency to affably slip up—get photographed making a funny face, mutter a mild curse loud enough for the hot mike to pick it up—but lacked the creepy uncle vibe. He was genuine. The consultant had muscled her way up the rungs of the D.C. political scene working under magnetic men, sociopaths, probably, who could fake sincerity well enough to fool most people. This politician, though, was different. No saint, but Americans didn’t seem to expect saints anymore, anyway. They wanted a man who believed what he was saying, even if what he was saying was complete bullshit, and the politician believed what he was saying, mostly.
Like tonight, at the library, when he trotted out the closest thing he had to a stump line, or a refrain. “My grandmother had a saying,” he told the folks gathered in the community room: about fifty people, capacity according to the fire code posted by the light switch, mostly 60-something women balancing their polyester-clad bottoms on metal folding chairs. They leaned forward expectantly. They liked talk of grandmothers. “Every person you meet, they might be having the worst day of their life. I thought I might be late tonight because we got stuck behind a slow car out on Elam.” (He always remembered the street names in the areas he visited, and he used them in the casual manner of a local.) “I won’t kid you. He was making me crazy. Going 10, 15, maybe, in a 25. I just about laid down on the horn. Then, I realized we were passing the hospital. He was looking for a turn. And my hand was hovering above that horn, and I thought, maybe this guy’s wife was in that hospital somewhere, dying. Or his child. Or maybe he was going in for a test and he was scared to death. And me, worst-case scenario, I might be one or two minutes late to this talk tonight. Those were the stakes. It’s so easy to choose that satisfying outburst of anger over the more complicated act of empathy.”
He ran a hand through his grayish-blonde hair. “It scares me to think that, but it also inspires me. It’s a choice. We have the power to make it. That’s why I’m running for office. Because it seems to me that so many of the things wrong with our country right now can be traced back to failures of empathy.”
If the politician had an obvious weakness, it was not knowing when to stop; he’d tire, lose some of his eloquence. He could feel the shift as it happened, the devolution of his sentences. Janette had chided him about this, had walked him through what she called “exit strategies, and he recognized their necessity but disliked their awkwardness, the tinny insincerity. After a few minutes of affable fumbling, he cleared his throat, took a sip of water. “Damn, I nearly forgot,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. He produced a smart phone and wagged it in the air. “I want to take your picture. Is that OK?” Most of the people in the audience smiled self-consciously, nodding a little. The politician thumbed the screen, swiped up for the camera, and switched to the reverse camera, then leaned back against the podium and lifted the phone up high. “Say cheese, ya’ll. I’ve tried to be more creative than that, but you should see the faces people make when they say, ‘Cunningham for Congress.’” The faces on his screen loosened into laughs, and he jabbed the shutter button a few times, rapidly. He glanced at the last photo. “Oh, good, you can’t even see how thin I am on top in this one,” he said, to more laughs. He pocketed the phone again.
“All right. Well. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for turning out tonight, folks, and for your support. I’ll be over at the cheese now if anyone wants me.” There was an eruption of enthusiastic applause, even some hoots, and the politician did a little waving jog over to the room’s corner, where Janette and the younger of the two interns, Libby, awaited him, beaming. This was the worst part of the night—the awkward transition from performance to one-on-one, how he had to appear to go off stage when there wasn’t even a stage, how he had to come up with some fake question for Janette, like, “And now we have about an hour for talking, right?” in order to not just stand there shuffling his feet until a line of audience members decided to form itself.
“Officially it’s another 45 minutes,” Janette says. “But it’s straight to the hotel from here, so take your time.”
“Great!” the politician said. The library employee was hovering nearby, uncertain—he had smelled her perfume, a suntan-oily musk, before he saw her—and so he smiled extra wide and angled his shoulders to include her in the exchange. When he’d met her an hour ago at the circulation desk, he’d made a quick mnemonic to remember her name: Sarah Sarah with the dye-job hair-a, and it came back to him with a satisfying snap. Her hair, scoured of most of its color, had been raked back into an oddly severe half-bun, tight enough that he could see a millimeter of brownish roots; the loose part hung, carefully waved, around her shoulders. She was youngish, mid-20s, perhaps, and her face was bronzed and pinkened with makeup that shimmered strangely under the room’s fluorescent lights, as if she had wandered in here, by mistake, from a 1980s cheerleading competition. She hadn’t quite struck the politician as, well, librarianish– and so, without any indication to the contrary, he’d determined that she must be some sort of secretarial figure, or part-time help to cover evening and weekend events like this one. He reached out and shook her hand firmly.
“This is a great space, Sarah,” the politician said. “Thanks for all your help.”
“Oh, it was a pleasure,” Sarah said. “Was the sound OK?”
It took him a moment to grasp her meaning. “Oh. The mike? Yeah, perfect. Did it sound good to you?”
“Oh, I though it was wonderful,” Sarah said. Her face, ruddy with make-up, reddened even more, and a flush crept splotchily across her chest. The politician noticed she already had a plastic cup of white wine in her hand; she’d wasted no time. “Wait. You meant the sound. Yes, that, too!” She giggled a little.
“Well, I’ll take the compliment! Glad you liked it, Sarah.”
“I have a son,” she said. She bobbed her head a few times. “So, you know. A lot of what you said. About education. And the planet. It spoke to me.”
“How old’s your son, Sarah?” A line had formed behind her now—eight, ten women. Holding cups of wine, biting into little hard cookies with their eye teeth.
“He’s four,” she said.
“What an age,” the politician said. “Learning so much, parroting what they hear. And their brains are little steel traps.”
Sarah giggled again. “Oh, yes. For sure.”
He could never bring himself to close a conversation with the old “I hope to have your vote in November” bit, so he shook her hand again, and patted it with his free hand, and said, “Well, again, thanks for all your good work here. I always feel at home in a library.”
“That’s great,” Sarah said. “Can I get you something? Water or wine, or a plate of food?” She pointed to the folding table. “The Women’s Club put together some local goodies. Benedictine sandwiches, mini pecan pies. Chips. I mean, just regular chips and regular dip. The kind from the store. But we have that, too. Oh, and we have cokes. I forgot to mention that before. And deviled eggs. That was me. I made them.”
He’d smelled the eggs from the podium: the Sulphur stench of yokes, bland tang of warming mayo. Like a promise, or a threat. But he nodded, smiled. “I’ll take one of everything, Sarah, and two of the eggs. Thank you so much. What a treat this is.”
“It was a pleasure,” Sarah repeated. She smiled, bobbed her head, and backed away. A few minutes later, as the politician chit-chatted with the next woman in line, she came briefly back to saddle him with a plate of food, and he thanked her again, and then he thanked her once more at the end of the evening as he, Janette, and Libby made their way, tiredly, toward the door. He knew this was only the tip of the iceberg, days like this. If he signed on for this life, there would be more long days, bigger rooms of people, more Sarahs with their vague need, their desire to see him, to be seen by him. More deviled eggs, and he’d have to pop them each into his mouth, whole, and chew and chew and smile like he loved it. He wasn’t a liar, but his grandmother had had another saying: Grin and bear it.
In another hour he was checked into the hotel. There was time to call Meg and the girls while Libby went to pick up Chipotle, and he ate his burrito bowl (chicken, no cheese or sour cream, no vinaigrette, one tablespoon—no more than that!—of guac) in bed watching an old Forensic Files episode. A beer would have been nice, but he knew better than to ask the intern to get him one. Sarah, after that last handshake of the evening, disappeared permanently from his thoughts.
He chewed the romaine, watched a detective discuss the significance of a missing light bulb in a lamp. He thought about how he needed to set his alarm early and hit the gym—too many 9:00 pm dinners lately, not enough trail runs. He thought about how thin his wife’s voice had been on the phone, her constant talk of stress, of exhaustion—the girls’ lessons and homework, their staggered pick-up and drop-off times, the questions they were asking about Dad and his job and why he was gone so much. And she talked, always, with a glum certitude, itself a kind of hope, that this would all be temporary. He’d run his unsuccessful run, dispatch with whatever sense of duty he’d felt (or succumb, at last, to the inevitable hubris), and resume their old life.
“I’m doing this for them,” he said—he always said. It was true. He hadn’t even wanted kids that much, that had been Meg’s deal, but once they were here she’d focused her most intense anxiety on what Grady perceived to be trivialities: potential gluten allergies, charter school lotteries, the number of RSVPs they’d received for Amelia’s fifth birthday party. In the meantime, he festered.
What kind of world are we leaving them? he’d ask her.
Oh, things always turn out OK, she’d say.
When has that ever been true?
If it’s never been true, why are you worried about the future?
How can you not be?
I worry about what I can control, Meg said.
So this campaign, maybe, was what he could control. He could know he’d fought the good fight. He’d changed a mind or two. And if the campaign took him away from his family, relieved him for four or five nights of the tremendous burden of his love, the tedium of the day-to-day—was that so bad? He had never once gone and knocked on Libby’s hotel room door, though he’d sensed her receptiveness to such a scenario.
The woman on TV had been murdered by her husband. It was always, the politician thought with a complicated mixture of shame and defensiveness, the husband.
◆
When Sarah got home, Jared was on the Playstation. It was the cowboy game. What she knew about the game was basically this: it had cowboys and it cost sixty dollars. The day Jared brought it home from Wal-Mart, he’d also come in with a bottle of Moscato and a bouquet of red roses, the grocery store kind that had a plastic sheet and a pouch of plant food rubber-banded around the stems.
Sarah sat on the couch and unzipped her boots. “Where’s Braden?”
“Upstairs,” Jared said, his eyes fixed to the TV screen. He wiggled a toggle on the controller with his thumb. “How’d it go?”
“Fine,” Sarah said. And fine it had gone, she supposed, but she’d driven home with her left leg jittering, the evening’s interactions, even the most trivial, circling her brain on repeat.
He shot her a look. “You sure?”
“Yeah. It went good. He said he liked the space. He liked the food. The ladies all seemed to like it. How about you? How was work?”
He shrugged. “Same old shit. I can’t complain.”
“Since when?”
He smiled. Onscreen, the cowboy swung off the back of a horse and started firing a gun at other cowboys. The animation was realistic but unsettlingly liquid, and Sarah found herself mesmerized by the gunfight. “Doug’s still a dumbass. Ashley’s still got a stick up her ass.” His tongue tip probed the corner of his mouth as he executed a play onscreen. “Lorrie ordered this cake thing for the break room, though. I almost brought you some. It was good.”
“That’s OK. There were pecan pies at the reception.” She checked her phone, did a quick scroll through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Outrage and babies. Gloom and doom and a recipe for chocolate dump cake. Someone had tagged her in a Facebook photo—a picture of her talking with Grady Cunningham after his speech. She looked awful. Fat, shiny. Red-faced. The airy, loose-fitting blouse that had seemed so cute in the mirror this morning appeared baggy and cheap. She untagged herself angrily and closed the app. “How long’s he been asleep?”
Jared, despite his distraction, followed her pivot. “He’s probably asleep by now. He was in our bed watching Bubble Guppies.”
“Jeez, Jared. You just plunked him up there so you could play your game?”
He stopped, exhaled, and rolled his head toward her. “I didn’t plunk him up there. We had dinner. I gave him a bath. I asked him if he wanted books or to watch a little TV before bed, and he said TV.”
“Well, of course he said TV. What else is he going to say if you give him the option?”
“Don’t make this into something it’s not, Sarah. He’s fine. He’s only been up there for thirty minutes, maybe.”
She shook her head in disgust, stood. “Did you at least put him in his pajamas and brush his teeth first?”
He cleared his throat. “I forgot his teeth.”
It was satisfying, in a way. Satisfying to leave Jared with his admission and his stupid game, satisfying to go to the kitchen for a glass of water and find on the countertop the grease-stained cardboard detritus from their McDonald’s dinner, satisfying to decide, last-minute, to instead pour a finger of Moscato into a jelly jar, then plod heavily up the grimy carpeted stairs. Satisfying in the same way it was to see that tagged photo of herself on Facebook—like, here’s the worst possible version of me, the version I spend most of my day trying to believe isn’t real. At least now I know.
When she was cleaning up after the reception, pacing the community room with a large black garbage bag and picking up the scattered wads of dirty napkins, the forks smeared with pecan-pie goo, she’d found the plate of food she made for Grady Cunningham. She knew it was his; it was resting on the corner of the table next to where he’d stood for most of the evening, chatting with the people from the audience. A small bite was missing from one of the deviled eggs she’d made; the teeth marks, like everything else about him, were perfect, even. The other egg— and he’d asked for two specifically—was untouched. And it was stupid, but she’d felt, tossing the plate of good food into the trash, this sudden flush of anger and humiliation, not just at the uneaten food, at what it implied, but his smiling, bobbing…damn it, she couldn’t even think of the word for it. Manner? Façade?
When she’d gotten the job at the library two years ago, she had been so proud and excited. It was good work, important work. Even fun work, like on the days when she got to change the seasonal bulletin board in the kids’ room, or when the Women’s Auxiliary reserved the community room for bunko, and they asked her to play with them, and sometimes she won one of the prizes—a china plate with a red bird on it; a set of tea towels. She loved to read. She read fifty books or more a year; she logged them dutifully into her journal. It was something people had noticed about her before she ever got the library job (Girl, you always have your nose in a book!), the reason Retta Lassiter, who had scanned Sarah’s library card so many times, encouraged her to apply for the part-time Circulation Clerk position when it opened up. She loved bringing books home for Braden and reading to him, too, and the teacher at his pre-school was always saying how smart he was, how sweet and good, and whatever it is you’re doing, Mom, keep doing it. How it warmed her heart to hear that!
She hadn’t been anyone special in high school. She hadn’t gotten a Senior Superlative, she hadn’t gotten a college scholarship, she hadn’t been an officer for one of the clubs or an athlete or a cheerleader or even one of the geeks or potheads or juvenile delinquents, notorious in their own right. She’d been the girl with the no-color, medium-length hair, slightly overweight, who made B minuses and Cs and whose senior section yearbook bio said, “DECA (1, 2), Home Ec, School Play Decorations (1),” and whose quote was from Katy Perry’s “Firework”: “Maybe a reason why all the doors are closed/So you can open one that leads you to the perfect road.” She didn’t remember submitting that quote. It must have been her; she had liked the song OK, like everyone else that year. But as with so many of her actions back then, or her inactions, the quote, now appended forever to her formal senior picture, the one with the velvet drape around her shoulders and the little gold wink of the cross pendant between her collarbones, seemed to have almost nothing to do with her. No one had suggested to Sarah then that there was a perfect road for her, that there were closed doors between her and her dreams, doors that she might one day open. No one, and that included Sarah herself, had operated under the assumption that Sarah had dreams, beyond marrying a steady, slightly overweight boy, as she’d done, and raising a few kids in a ranch house, where back-up 2-liters of off-brand coke sat on the counter, awaiting their turn in the refrigerator. “Dream” was just a word—a word she’d painted in careful cursive on some graying pallet planks and hung above her bed, the way she’d seen on Pinterest.
Braden was lying under that DREAM sign now, awake but glassy-eyed in the bluish-purple light of his cartoon. “Oh, hey, Mama,” he said. “You’re here.”
“Hey, buddy.” She set her wine on the bedside table and snuggled under the covers beside him. He kept his eyes on the TV but wriggled sideways, positioning himself in the crook between her left arm and her breasts. The top of his head was still cool from the bath, and it smelled like soap. Sarah planted a kiss on his crown. “How was your day?”
“Good,” he said. “Daddy got McDonald’s for dinner.”
“I heard that,” Sarah said evenly. “What about school?”
“I had a gold day,” Braden said. His preschool teacher awarded “medals” for behavior at the end of each day: gold, silver, and bronze. The real screw-ups got a frowny-face note sent in the homework folder to the parents. Braden, thank goodness, had never earned one of those. Sarah would have been mortified.
“That’s so great, buddy. What else happened?”
“I had a cheese quesadilla for lunch, but I didn’t eat the peas because they were yucky. And I didn’t like the crackers with the sweetness at the snack.”
“Who did you play with?”
“I played freeze tag with Cooper.”
“That sounds fun!” She squeezed him again and let her eyes flutter closed. It would be easy to fall asleep here, like this. Serve Jared right. She imagined him coming upstairs, finding Braden and Sarah unconscious and threaded together in the center of the bed. Turning around to go back downstairs and sleep on the couch. He’d probably just use it as an excuse to stay up playing more of the cowboy game, though.
“Buddy, it’s time to turn your show off. We need to brush teeth and go to bed.”
“But I want to finish this episode first.”
“No, buddy,” she said, churning again with that almost pleasurable anger at her husband. A note of defiance had crept into Braden’s voice; he wouldn’t consent to the show being turned off without throwing a fit, especially since it was 9:30 now and he was well past over-tired.
He screamed when she hit the power button on the remote, ran to his room and slammed the door when she tried to corral him into the bathroom to get his teeth brushed. “Do you want me to come up?” Jared yelled from downstairs.
“Please don’t,” she yelled back down at him.
She thought about leaving it—just letting Braden tire himself out, alone, and eventually make his way to the bed, or fall asleep on the floor among his matchbox cars. It wouldn’t kill him. Then she could get into her own bed with a book, finish a chapter before her eyelids sagged closed. But she felt, with her son more than she ever had with even Jared, that going to bed angry at each other was wrong. And, to be honest, she didn’t really want to lie down alone, yet, with the day and all it had churned up in her. Replaying the careful look on Grady Cunningham’s face. You don’t know me, she wanted to tell him. You don’t know who I am. What’s in my heart. She shed the baggy, un-cute blouse and her leggings, shrugged on a t-shirt and a pair of Jared’s boxers. She would let the tooth-brushing go, she decided, pulling her hair down from its half-bun and lining the bobbie pins up on her dresser top. But she’d still go tuck Braden in.
It wasn’t that Sarah had expected special treatment from the politician, or that he’d been some kind of hero of hers—she wasn’t even a Democrat. He hadn’t done anything clearly wrong tonight. There would be no explaining it later to Jared, though he’d try hard to understand; he wouldn’t tease her or belittle her. He’d try to say something supportive, like, “He’s just full of himself,” or, “What did you expect? They’re all crooked.” He wouldn’t get it.
When Sarah was pregnant, Jared had had to go away for a couple of days on a regional sales call, and she’d lain in bed one of the nights he was gone with her hand on her stomach and thought, I’ll never be alone again. She pictured, lovingly, the scenes she had heard other mothers complain about: hiding in the bathroom while the child hammered on the door, demanding admission; the toddler screaming for her, hands extended, as she tried handing him off to a babysitter. It would be frustrating occasionally, she’d thought, but it would be worth it. To be needed like that. To be that little person’s favorite person. What she hadn’t guessed was that she’d not only continue to feel lonely after Braden’s birth but that the nature of the loneliness would intensify, sometimes to levels she almost couldn’t bear, and she wondered if she was going crazy, if she should go talk to someone, though she wasn’t even sure what talking to someone would entail. And sometimes, when Braden was asleep and Jared wasn’t home, she would practice what she’d say to a doctor, if she ever saw one: I am terrified all the time. I don’t know what kind of world I brought him into. I love him so much that I almost wish he didn’t exist. And it feels like no one else feels this way. Jared doesn’t. My mother doesn’t. The women at work who are always asking me when we’re going to have another. They don’t. I feel like I’m either going out of my mind or I’m the only one who isn’t. Does that make sense? What do you think?
She thought about Grady Cunningham, his easy smile, his earnest solutions, and the uneaten egg he’d left on the table for her to trash. He wasn’t a bad man, and he was probably as good a man for the job as any of the rest of them. That was what scared her. Or, rather, it was another thing that scared her.
Braden was splayed diagonally across his bed, playing with Optimus Prime under the full harsh glare of the overhead light. Sarah could tell from his loose shoulders, the softness of his mouth, that he’d already forgotten his anger. This meant that they would either start the whole showdown over again or move past it as if it had never happened.
“Buddy, it’s bedtime,” she said, keeping her voice pleasant. “I’m going to turn your nightlight on and the big light off.”
He kept playing with the toy. “OK,” he said, and she sighed a little with relief.
When the overhead light was off and the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars on his wall and ceiling were emitting their dull, nuclear light, she took the Transformer gently from his hands, and he let her, and she shifted his legs over, pulled him up by the armpits so that his head rested on his pillow.
“How about a story?” he whispered.
“I don’t think I can come up with a story tonight, bud,” she said. “I’m too tired. I don’t have any good ideas.”
“You can tell this story,” Braden said. “Once upon a time, there was a boy with a dragon. The dragon could breathe fire but he was also nice. They flew all over the world together and when the boy was hungry the dragon would make a fire for him to cook his food. And the dragon’s name was Boo-lo-nee-fus. The end.”
“That’s a good story,” Sarah said.
“Now you say it.”
“What about a song instead?”
He thought about it. “OK.”
“Which one?”
“Farmer in the Dell,” he said, and Sarah groaned, but at least it was better than the never-ending “Old MacDonald.”
She made her way through the verses. When she was a kid it was just a song, like a dozen others the music teacher at school would plunk out on her piano, but now, like everything else, she’d overthought it, and it was ruined for her. The farmer takes a wife, she thought, singing it. Maybe I should change the verse sometimes. Maybe I should say, “The farmer takes a husband,” so Braden knows that girls can be farmers, too. (Or maybe he would think the farmer is gay? She hadn’t been able to bring herself to explain homosexuality to Braden, and she could guess what Jared would have to say if she tried.) Why oh why couldn’t she just sing her kid a song and not worry about every little thing?
The cheese stands alone, she finished. He always giggled at this part. “I’ll eat that cheese,” he said, pretending to snatch it from the air, and he went, “Yum yum yum yum yum.”
“Was it good?” Sarah asked.
He nodded.
“OK, buddy. I love you.” She bent over to kiss his forehead.
“Wait. Where’s French Fry?”
Sarah huffed and scanned the bed, turned back the covers. French Fry was a plush yellow cat he’d gotten at a Build-a-Bear birthday party: cheap, ugly, and not the thing Sarah would have chosen to become his lovey. What had been Sarah’s choice, in fact—a beautifully made teddy bear with long arms and legs and amber eyes made of real glass—sat on the top of Braden’s dresser, mostly untouched. “I don’t see him,” she said. “He’s probably downstairs. I think you had him on the couch.”
“You need to go get him,” Braden said.
“Baby, just go to bed. French Fry’s OK. You can see him in the morning.”
“Get him,” Braden said. “I need him.”
“You can at least ask me nicely. You can at least say please.”
“Pleeeeease?”
“OK,” she said. It was just a delaying tactic, but she would do it. She pushed to a stand. “Do you want anything else? Now’s the time to tell me. Do you need to go potty? Do you want me to get you some water?”
“Just French Fry,” Braden said.
“OK, then.”
The stairs creaked loudly with her descent. She’d told Jared once that she’d like to rip the carpet up—it was so ugly and stained, and no one had carpeted stairs anymore—and he’d said, “If we rip the carpet up there’s no telling what’s underneath.” So each time she scaled or descended them, she thought of this. Of the logic. The stairs, held together by old carpet and their thin hopes, rotten through underneath.
“He down?” Jared asked.
“Just about,” Sarah said. She crossed over to the couch, moved a cushion aside, a throw blanket. There. She snagged French Fry by the arm. “He wanted this.”
“I would have brought it up to you.”
“It’s OK. It only took me a second.” She looked at the stuffed cat and not at Jared. “I guess I’m turning in once I get back upstairs.”
“I won’t be much longer,” he said. “I have to finish this mission before I can save.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“And today really was OK?” he said. “You sounded—” He paused to charge his cowboy, on horseback, into a herd of cattle. “—stressed,” he finished. “Or something.”
“It was really OK,” she said.
Upstairs, she tucked French Fry under Braden’s arm and kissed him again. “Love you, my boy.”
“Love you, too.”
“Dream nice dreams.” Her throat was thick, and she blinked hard against tears she knew he couldn’t see in the dark.
“I will,” he said, and she envied him then. His casual certainty. His default contentment.
◆
The wall stars never hold their light for very long. Each night at this time, when Mama closes the door for good and he knows he is truly alone until morning, he wonders why they can’t just get wall stars that stay lit up. They could use batteries or electricity. And that way he wouldn’t have to lie here tracking their dulling glow. The worst part is that they go dim without ever disappearing entirely. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he’ll wake up, throat parched, and see the faint, greenish impressions all around him. Like ghosts. I don’t like the stars, he thinks. He wants to get out of bed, open the door, cross the hall to Mama and Daddy’s room and tell them this. He grips French Fry and churns with indecision. It’s important that he doesn’t like the stars, and that his mama knows, but she will not think it’s important. She will say, “Go to sleep, buddy,” or, if she’s mad, she will huff and say, “Braden, go to bed!” This is her yellow voice, and he doesn’t like it. The yellow voice is, “Braden, go to bed!” and “Dammit, Braden, hold your hands still before I hurt you!” when she’s clipping his fingernails. Sometimes she has the yellow voice with Daddy, and then it is, “I wish I wasn’t the only person in this house who knew how to put a dish in the dishwasher!” Like that. When he asked for French Fry tonight, she almost used her yellow voice but then she stopped.
Braden is glad. He squeezes him and kisses the top of French Fry’s head rapidly, one-two-three. The Build-a-Bear birthday party was the greatest day ever. He didn’t know he was going to get a toy. He hadn’t liked Zoe very much but then he liked her very much after he went to her party and got French Fry. Mama reminds him of this sometimes when he forgets. Sometimes, at daycare, Zoe tries to keep him from sliding and he gets mad. He tells Mama, “I hate Zoe,” and she says, “No you don’t, you like Zoe.” At first, this is hard to believe. His angry fists tell him he hates Zoe. But then Mama says, “Remember her birthday and how you got French Fry?” and then it’s oh, yeah, she is a nice girl after all.
Mama also has a purple voice, like tonight, when she said, “Love you, my boy.” The purple voice is somehow worse than yellow, even though it’s nicer. When she tells him goodnight with the purple voice, and then leaves him alone, he is gripped with terror, and he wonders why his mama loves him but lets him lie alone in the dark like this when they could just sleep side by side and everything would be all right.
Sometimes, he wonders what French Fry is thinking. He knows French Fry is a toy and not real. He doesn’t think French Fry moves or talks when he isn’t looking. But when Braden hugs him, like this, French Fry likes it. And when French Fry gets left alone downstairs, Braden thinks, he is scared. He is wondering where Braden is. He is wondering if Braden doesn’t love him anymore. I love you I love you, he whispers now to French Fry.
The stars have almost disappeared. The night is long, and sleep seems like a far way off.