The Narrows(12)

4



The dinner table was the only place the remainder of the Crawly family came together with any sort of regularity. It was a firm rule: no matter what your day and evening plans were, you had to be home for dinner. The only exception was when their mother had to work the dinner shift at the diner or if Brandy had an early babysitting gig. A few times Brandy had tried to weasel out of having dinner with the family so she could instead have dinner at a friend’s house or go to an early movie with some girls from school, but their mother had firmly put her foot down without so much as a discussion. “I don’t jockey around my shifts at the diner just to come home and have dinner at an empty table,” their mother was fond of saying. Matthew was only eleven, but he was not stupid. The dining ritual had been instituted right around the same time Hugh Crawly crept out and left them behind in the night. It was his mother’s way of making sure the remaining members of the Crawly household stayed together. Even at his unworldly age, Matthew felt a sense of sad desperation in his mother in knowing this.

With a light rain pattering against the kitchen windows, the three of them sat at the table. A fourth chair remained at the table, loud as an explosion in its emptiness. A few times, when it was Matthew’s turn to set the table, he’d accidentally set a place for his father, too. Once, it had made his mother cry. She’d gone out on the porch to do it, but it was summer and all the windows had been open, and he had heard her sobbing in her muted, embarrassed way. It had hurt Matthew terribly to hear it and Brandy had called him an idiot as she cleared away the extra place setting.

Matthew’s mother looked at him from across the table. Her face was too thin, her eyes like lusterless stones. She was still in her powder-blue waitress uniform, her name tag on her breast. Matthew could remember a time when he’d thought she was pretty—beautiful, even, in that innocent and giddy way all young boys find their mothers beautiful—but she looked simply tired and drained now. “Why don’t you say it, honey?”

“I said it last night,” he groaned. “Make Brandy do it.”

“I set the table,” Brandy countered quickly, “so you have to say it.”

“Matthew,” his mother said. The exhaustion in her voice informed him that this was not the time to argue over something so trivial.

“Dear God, thank you for the food and for bringing us all together again. Amen.” He had considered throwing in a request—namely, that no one would come in and buy the vampire mask from Hogarth’s before he was able to get down there early tomorrow morning with his and Dwight’s money in tow—but decided to omit it in the end.

His mother shoveled peas onto her plate. “How was everyone’s day?”

“Aced my geography test,” Brandy said.

“Nice job.”

“Then Mrs. Oxland almost got run over by a school bus.”

Wendy Crawly gaped at her daughter. “What?”

“She was out in the parking lot after school, yelling at some kid, not watching where she was going, and a school bus nearly ran her over,” Brandy said. “She hopped back up on the curb at the last minute.”

“Lord,” Wendy muttered. Her eyes swung toward her son. “How about you?”

Matthew shrugged. “School was okay.”

“Do anything fun after school?”

“Dwight and I went down to the park and played some kickball with some other kids.” He could tell his mother was suddenly scrutinizing the grime beneath her son’s fingernails. “Dwight kicked a home run and won the game,” he added quickly, hoping more detail would make a believer out of his mom.

“Dwight’s a big kid,” his mother said.

“Fat, you mean,” Brandy added.

“Shut up,” Matthew barked.

“You guys didn’t go anywhere else today?” his mother asked.

“No, ma’am.” His face burned.

“Interesting.” His mother got up, went to the fridge, and returned to the table with a bottle of Budweiser. Unscrewing the cap, she said, “So I guess David Moore would be lying had he told me he saw you and Dwight crossing Route 40 down by the Narrows this afternoon?”

Matthew felt a sinking in his stomach. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” said his mother. “Oh.” She took a small sip of her beer then set the bottle on the table. Foam bubbled up the neck, reminding Matthew of the fully working model volcano Jimmy Ornswaith had made for science class last year. “You know you’re not supposed to play out there,” his mother went on. “I’ve told you not to cross that highway and to stay away from the Narrows.”

“I didn’t want to go. There was this stupid dead deer Dwight wanted to see. Billy Leary said it had been killed by a bear and we—”

“We’ve talked about this, Matthew. You could drown in that water. Especially after the storm we’ve had. That water gets out of control and can be very dangerous.”

“We weren’t in the water. We never go into it.”

“You could have fallen in. It’s dangerous. You’re too young to be out there.”

“It’s where they found that boy,” Brandy spoke up, and Matthew looked at her, recalling that Dwight had said a similar thing. “The police found him in Wills Creek.”