LITMIR.BIZ

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      For my brother, Regi Brack

       Chapter one

       2001

      Five-fifteen p.m. Henry pushes open the door, drops his keys on the front hall table. “Mom?”

      He turns into the living room, shut up and dark, the curtain drawn against the brightness of the fall day. His shrunken mother is on the couch balancing a highball in one hand, a cigarette burning out in the other, in clothes that once fit properly but now swallow her up. Her thinning brown hair is flecked with gray and hanging loose from a swirl of a bun.

      “David?” she asks, not yet pulling her stare from the television set.

      “No, Mom. It’s me,” he says, “Henry.”

      She looks over and sees that yes, it is Henry. He can see the disappointment in her eyes, glazed over from the glow of the TV.

      He takes the cigarette from her, stubs it out in the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table and makes a mental note to clean up all the drink rings and ashes.

      He opens the curtains with the string pulley and when he turns back to her she is shading her eyes against the light, but then her hand drops back down to the couch.

      “How are you?” he asks.

      She does not answer him, but he is used to that and so has not waited for a reply.

      In the kitchen he opens the refrigerator to see what he’ll need to pick up at the grocery store.

      Over the din of squealing contestants spinning large dials, Henry asks, “How’re you feeling?”

      “Are you just home from football?” she asks. “How was practice?”

      “I’m home from work, Mom,” he says, taking a deep breath and leaning down to scoop her up. “Remember?”

      She clasps her hands behind his neck, holding on, bumping along in his arms with each step up the stairs.

      Henry is gentle placing her into her bed. Moving through the room, he picks up a Ladies’ Home Journal that has fallen to the floor from her nightstand, and replaces it within reach, right side up. On top of the Readers’ Digest.

      “How was work?” she asks, pulling the covers up.

      He pauses on his way out of the master bedroom to answer her.

      “You know what? It was a hard day,” he says. He sighs the kind of sigh that carries a weight. “Bye, Mom. I’m going out for a while but I’ll be back later, okay? I’ll check on you later.”

      She is already sleeping when he leaves.

      It was not always this way.

      “Henry, pass the baked beans, please,” his mother says. She rests her cigarette in the notch of the ashtray and reaches across the picnic table toward him.

      The clay container feels heavy to seven-year-old Henry and he concentrates very hard to make sure it does not tip on its way over the deviled eggs with the paprika sprinkled on top. Black flies scatter.

      “Thank you,” she says. She is making a point by emphasizing the please and thank you and waits with an expectation of you’re welcome from Henry. He stops chewing and with split-second reasoning decides the greater offense would be to talk with his mouth full so he nods his you’re welcome and hopes his mother will accept this as the best he can do under the circumstances. Did you see I did the right thing right you looked at me like it was good so maybe I did, he thinks, in one jumbled seven-year-old thought process.

      “Can I be excused?” Henry’s older brother, Brad, asks.

      “You haven’t finished your hot dog yet,” she says. Henry races to finish his own, to escape into the sunny day, away from the fragments of adult conversation floating over his head: Detroit riots. Sergeant Pepper and The Downfall of The Beatles. The Smothers Brothers, which he had indeed watched with his parents one night when they let Henry and Brad stay up past their bedtime, but Henry had not really liked the show and fell asleep before it finished so all he really wanted right now was to be released from the table.

      Brad crams the rest of the hot dog into his mouth and says, “Now can I?” Wonder bread bun flicks out of his mouth.

      Their mother sighs at Brad and looks away so their father, Edgar Powell, says, “Yes.”

      Henry’s father has a spot of ketchup on the front of his madras shirt, and Henry can tell this is bothering him because he keeps wiping it with his paper napkin and sighing in disgust when it refuses to disappear.

      “Can I, too?” Henry asks. The dinner is cutting into the July twilight that won’t hold its breath for long. So they squirm to be released because even hot dogs don’t make up for lost time in summer light, a conch-shell call to the young boys.

      “I swear it’s impossible to keep these children in one place for more than five minutes,” Henry’s mother says to the two other mothers on her side of the bench, who nod sympathetically, yes, yes it is hard to keep them in line so why even try just let them go boys will be boys after all.

      “Yes, you may both be excused,” she says, leaning across the table so her husband can light her next cigarette with his Zippo lighter.

      Henry notices she has not completely stubbed out her last cigarette. He looks up to see if this bothers her as much as it does him, and determining it does not appear to bother her in the least, he finger-stops the Coke in his straw and releases it over the smoking remains of cigarette. Gulping the last of his drink he sighs “aah” like

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