Release(12)

The Thorns did their best to have their externals match the LaGrandes. The internals – what with Adam’s mom being laid off last year as a linguistic analyst for the Defense Department in Seattle – were held together pay cheque by precarious pay cheque. Adam worked all the hours possible just to keep himself in fresh clothes and gas to put into the twenty-year-old Honda he’d found on craigslist for four hundred dollars.

Which meant shifts in the massive stockroom of the Evil International Mega-Conglomerate under Wade Gillings, who still managed a stockroom, however massive, at thirty-eight, whose slacks were of alarming tightness, and who was way, way too handsy.

“Thorn!” he yelled as Adam passed the closet that served as Wade’s insulting little office. A hand came out of the doorway to slap Adam’s left butt cheek.

Adam closed his eyes. “We’ve had this discussion, Wade. I will go to human resources.”

Wade, his moustache and feathered hair both several decades out of sync with anything modern, made a sad puppy-dog face and whimpered, faux tearfully, “I’m Adam Thorn and my pussy hurts.”

“Jesus, Wade–”

“You’re late.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Almost. I could write you up for that.”

“I’ll only be late if you hold me here and stop me from clocking in.”

Wade leered. “You want me to hold you, is that what you’re saying?”

Adam turned to the pad on the wall installed with the time-keeping app, realizing too late he was keeping his back to Wade, who slapped Adam’s right butt cheek, saying, “Get to work. Karen and Renee are in housewares.”

Adam sighed and clocked in. His phone buzzed as he made his way to the houseware section of the vast warehouse at the back of the main store.

I’m sensing some lack of okayness about the ruckus at home, Angela had just messaged. Am I high?

No, he messaged back. Just the usual.

The usual hasn’t historically been good. We’ll make it better tonight tho.

Everything okay? What do we need to talk about?

All fine, worry hamster. Wade feel you up yet? Because, inappropriate.

Adam had known Angela since the third grade, but they hadn’t become friends until their fifth-grade class took an overnight field trip to an observatory. It was Washington in October, so of course it was overcast, but the canny observatory owners had a planetarium as backup. Thirty ten-year-olds lay down their sleeping bags, heavily chaperoned by parents including Marieke Darlington, Angela’s mom. They watched the universe unspool above them. But that only took fourteen minutes, so the observatory just ran it again. After the fourth run-through, mutiny fomented and an observatory worker ran a “laser show” that hadn’t been on public view since the early eighties. Thirty drowsy ten-year-olds drifted off to the light-filled lullaby of Dark Side of the Moon.

Adam’s dad texted the next morning to say he’d be an hour late picking him up because Mrs Navarre had requested a faith healing for her rheumatoid arthritis. “Is that a real reason?” Angela’s mother had asked, but she offered him a ride home anyway. Adam and Angela sat quietly in the back seat as Mrs Darlington, a good ten years older than Adam’s own mother, did most of the talking via the rear-view mirror.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked. “I mean, I know you didn’t see any proper space stuff, but the planetarium show was nice, maybe not the last three times, and the laser show, my goodness, that took me back. I remember sneaking into one as a teenager in Holland with my sister and the pot smoke was so heavy, the lasers were almost 3-D. That’s when your aunty Famke met your uncle Dirk, Angela, and might even be the night she got pregnant with your cousin Lucas.”

“Mom,” Angela said, putting her face in her hands.

“What?” She glanced at Adam in the mirror. “I’m sorry, Adam, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“You didn’t embarrass me,” Adam said. Quite the contrary, Mrs Darlington talked like no other mother he’d ever met. He wanted her to keep doing it at length.

“My parents believed,” she continued, “that baby talk and avoiding topics was almost child abuse. That you’d end up raising swaddled little morons to send out into the world to be eaten alive. I preferred it when adults expected me to reach up to them rather than always leaning down to me. Do you see what I mean?”

“I do, actually,” Adam said, which was how he spoke, even at ten. He saw Angela give him an astonished side-eye from underneath her hands. “I think my mom and dad would still rather not reach up.”

Mrs Darlington laughed out loud at exactly the same moment a truck ran a stop sign and hit Mrs Darlington’s car just behind Angela, spinning it across the intersection and over an embankment, down which it rolled sideways a complete circle and a half, coming to rest on its roof in what was luckily a very shallow creek.

Mrs Darlington was badly injured: a broken arm and hip surgery kept her out of farmwork for nearly a year. But in the back seat, tiny Angela and prepubescent Adam had been small enough to be shaken in their seat belts as the car tumbled but without having been struck by anything worse than a loose textbook that knocked out one of Angela’s side teeth and blackened Adam’s eye.

Adam remembered the seconds after they came to a stop, before Mrs Darlington regained consciousness and tried not to scare the children by moaning too loudly, when he and Angela were side by side, hanging upside down, still buckled in, blinking in shock. She had looked over to him in the sudden violent silence and reached out for his dangling hand.