Spoonbenders полностью

“Show me what you’re drawing,” his mother says.

He doesn’t want to. It’s sad. But she’s seen his other sad drawings, so he moves his arm and she leans forward. It’s a black rectangle surrounded by green except for a few scribbles of red and yellow. She says, “Are those flowers?”

“I’m not good at them,” he says.

“Oh, I think you are,” she says. “And I like that there will be flowers near me. It’s a really nice grave, Buddy.”

It’s been months since the TV show where everything went wrong. Mom talks about all his sad pictures like they’re no big deal. She hardly cries (at least in front of him). She looks through what he’s drawn today, and then says, “Why don’t you draw me something from when you’re, say, twelve years old?”

He tries to remember all the way to twelve. He’s sitting in a building. It’s summertime, the medal heavy and slick against his chest. He’s taken to secretly wearing it under his clothes, like Superman’s outfit. Frankie’s there in the building, looking tall and skinny and tough. One of his favorite Frankies. Buddy draws another rectangle and Mom says, “That’s not another grave, is it?”

He shakes his head. “It’s a pinball machine,” he says. “Frankie’s really good at pinball. Plays it all day.”

“Oh,” his mother says. “That’s nice.” She’s not crazy about the idea, he can tell, but she has no idea how good Frankie’s going to be. “And you’re there, too?”

“I just watch,” he says. He draws himself next to the pinball machine, and draws a circle where the medal would be.

“Does Dad know about that?” she asks. “That you two are hanging out in a pinball parlor?”

He shrugs. He sees what he sees. He can’t read minds.

She takes one of the blank sheets of paper and starts writing on it.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I just wrote down, ‘When Frankie is sixteen, he gets really good at pinball.’ ”

“Oh.”

“I like to know what you’ll all be doing,” she says.

“After you’re dead,” he says.

“It’s like a future diary,” she says. “You draw, and I write down words, but it’s the same thing.”

“It doesn’t make you sad?”

She thinks about this. “Sometimes.” He likes that she doesn’t lie to him. “But other times, I’m just happy that you all grow up together, that you take care of one another.”

He doesn’t like to think about Mom not being there, in the future. But he’s known ever since The Mike Douglas Show that she’d be leaving them. Just like he knows that Irene is going to have a baby, and the baby’s going to be a teenager named Matthias, and someday he and Matthias will put brown tile on the front step.

Suddenly he’s dizzy. His body is little and big at the same time. His arm by the window is cold, but he can feel the sun on his back, feel the sweat running down his sides.

“Buddy?” Mom asks. “Buddy, look at me.” She comes over to his side of the table and crouches down. She turns his face in her hands. “Stay with me, kiddo.”

Yes. There she is. Mom’s here. Alive. Alive.

She runs a hand across his damp hair. “You’re sweating,” she says.

He pushes a palm against an eye. He nods.

“Tell me what this is, Buddy,” she says, and points to the drawing of himself.

“It’s a medal. I used to wear it all the time, then.”

“What medal is that?”

“The one you’re about to show me,” he says.

Her eyes go wide. Talking about her death didn’t make her cry, but this does. Then she smiles, a brilliant, uncontained smile, and says, “Oh, that medal.”

She leads him upstairs to her room, and opens a drawer. “This was given to me a while ago, but soon it will belong to you.” It’s wrapped in a scarf that she never wears because it’s too fancy, too colorful. Teddy’s taste, not hers. She peels back the cloth, and the gold is as bright as her smile.

“You have a wonderful gift,” Mom says. “I know it’s hard sometimes. I know you get worried. But I know you’ll always do the right thing, because you have a good and noble heart.” She waits until he looks her in the eye, and then she touches her forehead to his. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “It’s all going to work out.”

Irene pulls up with the windows down, and he can hear her singing along with the radio. Even after she turns off the car she keeps singing: “Ba-a-a-nd, on the run. Doot-do-do-do-doo.” Buddy loves to hear her. She sings all the time when she’s a girl of nine and ten, and hardly at all when she’s older. But in the early weeks of August 1995, right before the end, she turns into Maria von Trapp. She sings every time she takes a shower. She hums while she’s cooking dinner. And when she’s not saying anything at all, she seems to be swaying to music he can’t hear.

She sees the newly tiled front step, finished now except for the cleanup, and instead of yelling at him or asking him what the hell he’s wasting his time on, she just shakes her head. “Buddy, that’s indoor tile.”

Matty says, “So?”

“So it’s going to be slick as hell in the winter.”

“It’s not slippery,” Matty says. “Try it.”

“Wait till it rains,” she says.

“Just try it.”