The Summer That Melted Everything(13)

“Where you goin’?” Mom gently grabbed Grand’s arm.

“I got baseball practice.” He leaned in for a kiss. “See ya later.”

“In time for dinner?”

“не пропустите это для мира.” He took his smile close to her ear, where he whispered the translation, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

I looked at his shoelaces and their reddish brown staining. He saw me and tipped his ball cap before jumping to the ground from the top porch step. And I smiled, as in love with my older brother as any young boy could be.

“It’s volcano weather ’round here.” Mom slung her head back, trying to toss her long black hair. As usual, the ends were tied up in her apron strings, looking like a tail at her backside. A tail Dad would’ve come up behind and tugged, if he’d been there.

While Grand took after Dad’s brown hair and blue eyes, I took after Mom. Our hair, in its rib-cage shape, fell in a blackness that wisdom calls night. Its winding way was a narrative of the hills, it was the snakes swimming the river, the crow strapped with worms. Dad called it scared hair, the way it curled up into itself at the ends.

This scare would fall to my shoulders then, as it would for the rest of my life, as it does now. Though in youth it was described as swept by the wind, now, in its white and dark gray staying, it is merely disheveled, falling across my shoulders like claws settled in. As is my beard, like a talon on my chest, but I like to think it is my best Walt Whitman.

I tried to count my moles once. The same flat ones she had and which she called chocolate chips. When I was a real small kid, I actually believed the moles were chocolate chips and that if she stood too close to the oven, they’d melt away, so I’d tug on her apron strings and she’d laugh as I led her from the heat.

There was something smeared about our eyes, mine and Mom’s, like contact made with ink before it has had the chance to dry. In my youth, such eyes used to look exotic. Now they’re just something tired.

“So.” Mom lightly clapped her hands once and turned to Sal and me. “Where would you boys like to go first? We can go to Chile, Egypt, Greece, New Zealand. And all in one afternoon.”

She led us into the house, which she had arranged and decorated as invertebrate versions of the nations of the world. Mom herself had never been anyplace but Breathed, so she based her countries on what books told her and what photographs showed her they were like. Because of this they lacked the culture of the traveler and instead held true to that glittered optimism of the one who has yet to travel beyond the picture on the postcard.

She showed Sal room after room, quietly and with only her nylons swishing. The rooms verged on the gaudy, with trinkets, paintings, bright wallpaper done up in the countries’ colors and floras. Fabric was imported. Wood was country specific. The most expensive items were special ordered over the phone, the cheaper charms straight from catalog. She did hire carpenters, painters, artists, any and all who would carve for her the Taj Mahal in our dining room table, Saint Basil’s Cathedral in the fireplace mantel, the Great Wall in the crown molding.

Making a world proved to be expensive, and had there been only Dad’s income, we would have lost more than the respect of the rooms. But Mom was the daughter of the tennis shoe king of Breathed, and after he died she became the sole heir of Breathed Shoe Company, with the factory located just outside town.

“Folks say I shut myself up, never seein’ the world, but I ask ya how can anyone see as much of the world as I see on a daily basis?” She spun in the middle of Spain.

“But they’re not the real places.” Sal’s statement brought her to a sudden stop. “That Machu Picchu in the other room is smaller than a shrub. Don’t you want to see the real places? The real world? Feel the sun on your face as you marvel at the pyramids? Feel the rain while on top of the Eiffel Tower?”

I nudged him with my elbow. “I told ya she’s afraid of the rain.”

Mom dropped to the floor, crossing her lanky legs beneath the billowy skirt of her dress. She propped her elbows up on her knees and held her face with a sigh while the shadows of the room lengthened out toward her, making her one of them.

“What’s the matter with her?” Sal looked on.

“I’m fine.” Her whisper crippled her words. “You boys go on, have your fun. Don’t worry ’bout me. I’ve a whole world ’round me. Why shouldn’t I be fine?”

“C’mon.” I tugged his arm. “I’m starvin’. Let’s make some sandwiches.”

“I don’t want sandwiches.” He groaned like a true kid as I pulled him into the kitchen. “I want ice cream.”

“Oh, that’s right.” I let his thin arm go. On my way to the freezer he asked about Mom’s fear of the rain.

“Oh, um…” I tossed around the frozen vegetables, looking for any ice cream. “Don’t know, really.”

“You’ve never asked her?”

“Oh, man, I forgot the groceries on the porch.”

“I said, you’ve never asked her?”

“Well, yeah, I…” I saw the box of frozen fish sticks. “I think it has somethin’ to do with a fish or swimmin’ or somethin’. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember why your mother is afraid?”