The Best American Short Stories® 2011 by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

How she got on the bus last week?
    Louis's mom is a born-again Christian with two poodles and a coke habit, the kind of person I avoid at T-ball games and open houses at school.
    Tuesday afternoon, Ike says, she boarded the bus with her dogs, raised her fist, and said, "Christ is risen! Indeed, he is risen."
    No, I say. Really?
    Ike pauses for a minute, as if he needs time to conjure the scene. Really, Ike says. Louis pretended not to know her when she got on, but his mom held on to that chrome bar at the front of the bus and said, "Lord, I've been places where people don't put pepper on their eggs." And she started to dance.
    Ike waves his arms in front of his face, fingers spread, imitating Louis's strung-out mother. I see the rust-colored clouds of eczema on his forearms. I want to fix everything. I want him to know nothing but gentle landings. I don't want him to know that people like Louis's mom exist, that people fall into landmines of pain and can't crawl back out.
     
    When Ike was almost a year old, I took him by for Mom to hold while I emptied the old milk from her fridge and scrubbed her toilets. The house was beginning to smell; Mom was not cleaning up after the bird. Suddenly, the woman who'd ironed tablecloths, polished silver, bleached dinner napkins, and rotated mattresses had given up on decorum.
    Would you like to hold Ike while I clean? I said.
    Mom sat in a brown leather recliner, Carnie in his white lacquered cage a foot away from her—almost always within sight. She was losing weight and I worried she wasn't eating well. I brought cartons of cottage cheese and chicken salad, only to find them spoiled the following month.
    Are you trying to sell my house? she said. Are you giving realtors my number? They're calling with offers.
    There's a shopping center going in next door, I said. This may be your chance to sell.
    I placed Ike in her arms.
    It's not hard to lose the baby weight, Mom said, eyeing my waistline, if you try.
    I was determined not to fight back. There was heat between us, long-standing arguments we could still feel burning. Should we sell Dad's tools? Should she go to the eye doctor? Who would care for her goddamned bird? Didn't I know how hard they'd worked to give me the right opportunities? Our disagreements were so sharp, so intense that we'd become afraid to engage with each other, and when we stopped fighting, we lost something.
    You're like your father now, she said. You never get mad, even when you want to.
    It was true—Dad was hard to anger, even when I'd wasted $15,000 of his hard-earned money my freshman year of college at a private school they couldn't afford. The night I came home for the summer, he'd sat with his hands in his lap and a look on his face that was more sad than disappointed. Mom stood behind him, silent and threatening. I knew later she'd berate him for taking it easy on me, and I hated her for it.
    I guess you'll need to get a job, he said.
    Dad, I said. I made a lot of mistakes this year—
    I wanted to give you a good chance, he said, looking down at his fingers.
    I remember feeling relieved that he wasn't yelling at me. Now I wish he had.
    I'd do it again, he said. But you understand, there just isn't enough money.
    I tortured myself imagining each of his hours. He worked at the same plant for twenty-six years making industrial-quality tools—hammers, chisels, knives, clamps. Every day he ate a cold lunch on a bench caked with pigeon shit. I could almost hear the echoes of men moving and talking, their spoken lives bouncing from the plant rafters as their hands worked. The black hole of his effort, the way it would never be enough, or easy—it hung over me, a debt I couldn't pay.
    Mom ran her fingers over Ike's cowlick. I emptied the trash can in the kitchen, then the living room.
    While you're at it, she said, would you change the newspaper in Carnie's cage? And top off his water?
    As I approached the bird's cage, he let out a piercing cry, his black beak