The Music of What Happens(15)

“Taste test,” she shouts from the couch in the TV room, and even though I’m covered in sweat and exhausted, I have to smile, because my mom’s back. “I was gonna do it alone, but now that you’re here …”

She’s lined up five different rows of two jelly beans on the leather ottoman in front of the couch where we normally put our feet. I would probably not eat jelly beans off the ottoman Dorcas regularly sits her naked butthole on, but Mom is carefree that way and who am I to stop her fun? I drop my wallet and keys on the counter and join her.

She sits up straight and closes her eyes. “Put them in whatever order you want. I want to see if I can figure out the flavors without looking.”

I shuffle them around a bit and hand her a light purple one. She looks like a little kid, holding her hand out for a treat. It’s kind of adorable. She pops it in her mouth and her cheeks pucker as she makes a big show of trying to guess the flavor.

“Hmm,” she says. “Chewing, chewing …”

“What do you think?”

“Nope. Withholding my guesses until I’ve had them all.”

“You’re a jelly bean connoisseur,” I say.

She smiles, her eyes still squeezed shut, and then she shouts “Next!” in a funny falsetto, like she’s the queen of England or something.

As I hand her the second, I don’t notice Dorcas creeping around us. She jumps up on the ottoman, scattering the jelly beans, and hoovers down as many of them as she can before I can stop her.

Mom’s eyes flash open. “Traitor!” she yells.

Dorcas leaps backward into the television. It begins to wobble and I run over and try to catch it before it tips over onto the floor. I get a sweaty hand on the edge of it, and it steadies a bit, but it continues to teeter and my second hand whiffs trying to get a hold of it. Luckily, Mom has jumped up from the couch and is able to get a firm grab on the other side before it thwacks the floor and shatters into a zillion pieces.

I look over at Mom holding the television up while I am standing there trying to balance the side of the TV like a stereotypical French waiter, and as Dorcas skulks away, we laugh and laugh, and I take back just about every negative thing I’ve been thinking about her all day as I was toiling away on the truck.

She sets the TV back up and gets a drinkable strawberry yogurt to wash down her jelly beans, and despite being disgustingly sweaty I flop down on the opposite end of the couch and start to tell her everything about the truck. Dorcas curls up by my mom’s feet, still eating the last of the jelly beans she stole.

“So Max is …”

“Cute?” she says, raising an eyebrow.

“I was gonna say annoying,” I say, grinning, and she raises her eyebrows a few times at me.

“Sure you were,” she says, teasing.

“And what have you been doing today?” I ask, changing the subject.

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, you know. I get these ideas but then I don’t, like, I don’t know. My follow-through is subpar.”

I smile at her. She smiles back, and then, it’s so weird and so fast. The smile turns to a grimace, and it’s like her face breaks and suddenly there are tears.

“Mom,” I say, leaning forward.

“Oh God,” she says. “Here we go again. It’s all to shit.”

I jump up and sit down next to her head. “Mom.” I stroke her hair, which feels a little oily and unwashed.

“I almost went to Casino Arizona today,” she says, and she sits up and puts her head on my shoulder and leans it into my neck.

“Oh.” After Dad died, Mom went through a gambling stage. It wasn’t a ton of money, but I guess it was enough to scare her, because she started going to meetings about it. She hasn’t gambled since, and every year I go to her Gamblers Anonymous birthday, where people I have never met before hug me tight and tell me how great a support I am to Lydia E. I have never told Pam or Kayla. I definitely think they would not get it.

“I didn’t, but. I definitely had the urge.”

“Well you didn’t, so that’s something. Did you, like, call your sponsor?”

She nods her head gently into my neck and I reach up and stroke her hair. “Good,” I say. “That’s good.”

“It’s just the pressure,” she says, and part of me thinks, Yeah, I totally get that. Another part is like, What pressure? You sat on the couch all day.

“Sure,” I say. “Well you should be proud. Willpower and all.”

“I guess.”

“You’re too hard on yourself. That’s like a victory,” I say, channeling the Gamblers Anonymous meetings I’ve been to. “You didn’t gamble today. That’s awesome.”

She just keeps sniffling into my shoulder, and I keep on stroking her hair, and there’s this part of me that wants to not be here, doing this. Being her strength or whatever.

I hate that part of me.

“I need more jelly beans,” she says, and I laugh.

“Well c’mon then,” I say, and I stand up.

“Where are we going?”

“Sweeties,” I say, meaning the huge candy warehouse in Mesa. “Jelly beans for dinner,” I say.

Her eyes light up. I don’t think anything will ever make me quite as happy as when my mom’s eyes light up.