Defending Jacob(49)

One night in May—28 days after the arrest, 151 still to go—the three of us were sitting at the dinner table.

Jacob was sullen. He rarely lifted his eyes from his plate. He chewed his food noisily, like a little kid, making wet, squishing sounds, a habit he had since he was a little kid. “I don’t understand why we have to do this every night,” he said in an offhand way.

“Do what?”

“Have, like, a big sit-down dinner, like it’s a party or something. It’s just the three of us.”

Laurie explained, not for the first time, “It’s pretty simple, really. That’s what families do. They sit down and have a proper dinner together.”

“But it’s just us.”

“So?”

“So it’s like, every night you spend all this time cooking for three people. Then we sit down and eat for, like, fifteen minutes. Then we have to spend even more time after, doing all the dishes, which we wouldn’t even have if you didn’t make such a big deal about it every night.”

“It’s not so bad. I don’t see you doing too many dishes, Jacob.”

“That’s not the point, Mom. It’s just a waste. We could just have pizza or Chinese or whatever and the whole thing’d be over in like fifteen minutes.”

“But I don’t want the whole thing to be over in fifteen minutes. I want to enjoy dinner with my family.”

“You actually want it to take an hour every night?”

“I’d prefer two hours. I’ll take what I can get.” She smirked, sipped her water.

“We never made a big deal about dinner before.”

“Well, we do now.”

“I know why you’re really doing it, Mom.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“So I won’t get all depressed. You think if I just have a nice family dinner every night, my case will just go away.”

“Well, I certainly don’t think that.”

“Good, because it’s not going away.”

“I just want it to go away for a little while, Jacob. Just one hour a day. Is that really so awful?”

“Yes! Because it doesn’t work. It makes things worse. It’s like, the more you pretend everything is so normal, the more you remind me how un-normal it really is. I mean, look at this.” He waggled his arms around, flummoxed by the old-fashioned, haimish dinner Laurie had made: chicken pot pie, fresh string beans, lemonade, with a cylindrical candle for a centerpiece. “It’s fake normal.”

“Like jumbo shrimp,” I said.

“Andy, shush. Jacob, what do you want me to do? I’ve never been in this situation before. What should a mom do? Tell me and I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know. If you want to keep me from getting depressed, give me drugs, not … chicken pot pie.”

“I’m afraid I’m all out of drugs at the moment.”

“Jake,” I said between bites, “Derek could probably hook you up.”

“That’s very helpful, Andy. Jacob, has it ever occurred to you that the reason I make dinner every night, and the reason I don’t let you eat in front of the TV, and the reason I don’t let you stand around the kitchen eating your dinner out of Tupperware or skip dinner altogether and stay up in your room playing video games, is because of me. Maybe this is all for me, not you. This isn’t easy for me either.”

“Because you don’t think I’m going to get off.”

“No.”

The phone rang.

“Yes! I mean, obviously. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to count every dinner.”

“No, Jacob. It’s because I want to have my family around me. When times are tough, that’s what families do. They gather around, they support each other. Everything isn’t always about you, you know. You need to be there for me too.”

There was a moment’s silence. Jacob seemed unabashed at his adolescent self-absorbed narcissism; he just couldn’t think of a suitably snappy comeback.

The phone rang again.

Laurie gave Jacob a so-there look—eyebrows raised, chin tucked—then she got up to answer the phone, hurrying a little to reach it before the fourth ring, when the answering machine would intercept the call.

Jacob looked wary. Why was Mom answering the phone? We had already learned not to respond to the ringing. Jacob knew, certainly, that the call was not for him. His friends had all dropped him cold. Anyway, he had never used the telephone much. He considered it intrusive, awkward, archaic, inefficient. Any friend who wanted to speak to Jake would just text him or log on to Facebook to chat. These new technologies were more comfortable because less intimate. Jake preferred typing to talking.

I felt an instinctive urge to warn Laurie not to answer, but I held back. I did not want to spoil the evening. I wanted to support her. These family dinners were important to Laurie. Jacob was essentially right: she wanted to preserve as much normalcy as possible. Presumably that’s why she let her guard down: we were laboring to behave like a normal family, and normal families are not afraid of the phone.

I said, in a coded reminder, “What does the caller ID say?”

“ ‘Private caller.’ ”

She picked up the phone, which was in the kitchen, in clear view of the dining room table. Her back was to Jacob and me. She said, “Hello,” then went silent. Over the next few seconds, her shoulders and back slumped by infinitesimal degrees. It was as if she was deflating slightly as she listened.