The Candy House(72)
Mom leaves the kitchen and stands beside Dad’s recliner, looking down. “They don’t look remotely alike,” she says. “Do you see any sibling resemblance?”
“We’ve never been on good enough terms with him for me to get a close look at his face,” Dad says.
“I think he’s given up on the journalism,” Mom says. “He’s around the house a lot.”
“You’re around the house a lot,” Dad points out.
“I’m keeping an eye on him.”
Dad carefully sets down his newspaper—the equivalent, for Dad, of standing up and staring fixedly into Mom’s eyes. “Observe the property line, Noreen,” he says. “If you encroach on their property again, I can’t protect you. Hannah, are you listening?” he calls to me through the kitchen door. I’m always listening. “You are my witness.”
“What if he encroaches?” Mom asks.
A few months after Stephanie Salazar’s brother moved in with Mr. and Mrs. Salazar, Mom saw him climbing into their house through a window (he’d forgotten his keys) and called the police to report a break-in. She knew exactly who he was but didn’t trust him, she told Dad (who told me), having received hostile looks while gardening near the split-wood fence that separates our yard from the Salazars’ yard. What Mom didn’t know was that Stephanie’s brother was on parole, which resulted in the police taking him away in handcuffs. That night, the Salazars came over to talk to Mom and Dad about Stephanie’s brother and his mental health. Bennie Salazar discovered Dad’s favorite band, the Conduits, and produced all their songs, so Dad broke out the bourbon and nodded sympathetically while Mom gazed at the window like she was distracted by a sound that no one else could hear. Sure enough, while that conversation was going on, a portion of the fence between our two yards tipped drastically in our direction, violating our “airspace,” as Mom put it, and “aggressing” one section of her pink phlox. A few weeks later, Mom dug up one of the fence posts with an electric shovel-drill she rented from Ace Hardware and moved the post five inches onto the Salazars’ property. She was giddy when we got home from school. She sang as she cooked and chuckled as she folded laundry. That night, I answered the front doorbell and found Stephanie Salazar’s brother standing there, pale and shaking with rage, clutching a tape measure. I called for Dad, and they went into the backyard and looked at the fence post together. Dad agreed that it had been moved and hired a handyman to move it back.
That was two years ago, when I was a freshman. We were all sorry when the Salazars split up, Dad most of all. Bennie Salazar moved to Manhattan, and now we only see him when he picks up or drops off their son, Christopher, who’s a year older than Molly. Bennie Salazar waves to us from the window of his sports car. “What a loss,” Dad always says.
After Mom and I finish cleaning up, I stay downstairs with Dad, studying for my AP finals, while Mom goes upstairs to help Brian and Molly with the many things they need help with. Brian’s cup underwear is uncomfortable and he has a baseball game tomorrow, so Mom drives to the Modell’s four towns over that’s open late to pick up new cup underwear one size bigger, and afterward she helps Brian with his math (Mom is freakishly good at math). Later I hear Molly crying to Mom about her friend sagas, which are never-ending. I stopped bringing my problems to Mom a few years ago, as she predicted I would. “I can only help you until high school, Hannah, maybe not even, and after that you’ll be on your own,” she used to say over my objections and denials. But she was right: By high school, I saw Mom differently. Now it’s Dad I turn to.
When I was little, I had a fear of dying in my sleep. Mom never said, “That’s silly. You’re going to live forever, sweetheart, and so am I, and so is our whole family and everyone we love.” Instead, she got out her stethoscope, hospital-grade thermometer, and blood pressure cuff and took my vital signs.
“Normal,” she said. “You won’t die tonight.”
According to Mom, you have to be careful or the forces of doom will line up against you. Things are more connected than they seem. The world is cruel and irrational, the strong thrive at the expense of the weak, and happy endings are purely a matter of framing. She emphasized this last point at the end of every fairy tale she read to us:
“We’ll see if the prince still loves her when she’s middle-aged and has stretch marks, or whether he trades her in for a newer model.”
“Yes, the prince inherits his rightful kingdom—until an enemy prince invades it and slaughters them all.”
“?‘Happily ever after’ so long as the hundreds of serfs toiling in the fields and scores of servants that make a castle habitable keep slogging away.”
“In the real world, there’s only one ending, and it isn’t happy,” Mom has been telling us for as long as I can remember. And when these dire pronouncements made us cry, she would gather us into her arms and murmur, “My beloved children, things are interwoven in ways we don’t understand. There are conspiracies. There are plots. I am your mother. You come from my womb. And I will kill anyone I have to kill to protect you.”
Nowadays I find it painful to have a mom who’s widely perceived as unhinged—a mom my friends laugh at. But when I was young and she was all I knew, I lived inside a force field that shielded me from every danger without concealing it. She made me strong.