Brock Clarke - Exley

“How am I supposed to run an office with only one person?” she said. She was a little breathless, maybe from the Early Times.

“I don’t know,” I said. I knew Mother used to work with another lawyer, but I didn’t know anything about him except that he was a him and had been fired or quit or something a little less than a year ago. Anyway, he wasn’t there anymore, which meant Mother was the only lawyer in her office.

“It’s garbage,” Mother said. “It means for a year I’ve been working two people’s cases instead of one.”

“Like what kind of cases?” I asked. Because I was interested. I’d never told Mother this, but I sometimes wondered if I might want to be a lawyer.

Mother reached back, yanked the rubber band off her hair. The hair fell to her shoulders and she mussed it up with the hand that wasn’t holding her drink. “This morning, I met with this woman with her head wrapped up. She had a concussion. This afternoon I met with the little fucker she’s married to. He was a big little fucker. His hand was in a cast. He’d broken it on her head.” Mother didn’t sound angry when she said this, though. She wasn’t like most people, who swore when they were angry. Mother only swore when she was tired. My dad also always said about Mother’s job, “Carrie, I don’t know how you do it.” I didn’t know, either. Which made me think I didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. Being a lawyer meant you got tired. I never got tired reading. My eyes sometimes did, but I didn’t. “The thing is,” Mother said, “she doesn’t want to press charges.” Mother paused and nodded, as if she was hearing a voice in her head. “Because women are fucking stupid,” she said, as if the voice had asked her, Why?

The water in the pot started boiling. Mother finished the rest of her drink, put the glass on the counter, went to the cabinet, pulled out a box of macaroni, and dumped some of it in the pot. Her back was to me; she seemed to be looking at something in the pot. Suddenly she turned and asked, “Why did you get home so late today?”

“Huh?” I said.

“You got home after I did,” Mother said. Her eyes were narrow; her hands were on her hips. “Where were you this afternoon?”

I tried to think fast. I couldn’t say I was at Harold’s, studying, because that’s what I told Mother I was doing every Tuesday night, when I was teaching my dad’s class at the college. I couldn’t tell her the whole truth — that I’d been visiting my dad at the VA hospital — because she would say I was making it up, just like I’d made up my dad’s letter, just like I’d made up my dad going to Iraq in the first place, just like I was behind the phone call she got from the VA hospital two weeks ago. So I decided to tell a lie that, if I’d said it the day before, would have been the truth. “I was at the doctor’s,” I said.

Mother was still squinting at me. I didn’t say I’d been at Dr. Pahnee’s because she didn’t know about Dr. Pahnee; as far as Mother knew, I was still seeing the first doctor. They were in the same practice, and so Mother wrote the checks out to the same place. After I made the first doctor refer me to Dr. Pahnee, I’d asked Dr. Pahnee if I should tell Mother I’d switched doctors. “Better not tell her,” Dr. Pahnee had said. So I hadn’t. “But you see him on Wednesdays,” she said.

“He said I could see him other times, too,” I said. “Whenever I needed to.”

Mother walked over to me and squatted. She used to do this when I was younger, and smaller, so she could be at eye level with me. Except I was bigger now, so her eyes looked right into my chin. This seemed to surprise her, and she stood up straight, which was probably more comfortable for both of us.

“Why did you need to see him today?” she asked. Her voice was full of concern, and in it I heard an opportunity. I didn’t think I could ask Mother what I wanted to, which was: You know my dad went to Iraq. Why won’t you say so? You got a call from the VA hospital. Why won’t you tell me you got that call? Why don’t you believe that he’s there? Why don’t you go visit him? Because if I asked these direct questions, Mother would be able to say that she didn’t know any of that, and that neither did I, and I should stop making things up. So I decided to try something else.

“I just had a question,” I said. “And I needed the doctor to answer it.”

“Did he?”

“He told me he wasn’t the one who should answer the question,” I said. “He said you should.”

“Answer what question?”

I drew a breath and said, “Why couldn’t my dad have gone to Iraq?”

I thought Mother was standing straight before. But she somehow straightened up even more. She put her hands back on her hips. She became more like a mother, in other words. I didn’t like the change, and I don’t think Mother liked it, either: she had a pained look on her face, like she was preparing to swallow something gross. I sometimes wondered if Mother actually wasn’t a “Mother,” not really, except for the times my dad and I made her into one. “Miller,” she said, “we’ve talked about this.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “I know he didn’t go to Iraq. I’m just wondering why he couldn’t have .”

Mother smiled at me. It wasn’t a comforting smile. It was a triumphant one. I knew the soldiers who hurt their wives didn’t deserve any pity. But I could see Mother smiling at them like that, and I pitied them, just a little.

“Because,” she said, “your dad never cared about the war at all, let alone cared enough to go fight in it.” I knew why Mother said this. I remember the day the planes ran into the towers in New York City. I was home with my dad. I wasn’t old enough to be in school. I was playing with something on the living room floor, and my dad was lying on the couch reading a book. The phone rang. My dad got up and answered it, then listened for a little while. “Jesus H. Keeriiist,” my dad said. Then he listened for a while longer. “OK, I’ll tell him,” he said. He listened for another second. “Me, too,” he said, and hung up the phone. He came back into the room and lay back down on the couch. “Your mom says to tell you that she loves you,” my dad said. Then he went back to reading his book, which I know now had to be A Fan’s Notes . He didn’t turn on the TV, or radio, or anything. I didn’t hear about what had happened until Mother got home that night, and then only because I overheard my parents talking in their bedroom.

“You didn’t turn on the TV, or radio, or anything?” Mother asked. “Weren’t you even a little bit interested?”

“For Christ’s sake, of course I was interested,” my dad said. “But I was in the middle of something.”

Anyway, that’s why Mother said my dad didn’t care about the war. But then again, I didn’t really care about the war, either, until my dad was in it. I bet that’s how it was with my dad, too; I bet that’s how it is with most people. I was going to tell Mother that, but she put out her hand to stop me and listed all the other reasons my dad couldn’t have gone to Iraq: Because he was forty, which was too old. Because he was in only so-so shape, even for a forty-year-old, and definitely for a forty-year-old who wanted to join the army. Because he was lazy, and they didn’t like lazy people in the army. Because it took a long time to train a lazy, out-of-shape forty-year-old man to go to war, and according to the letter I got, he must have trained for only a few months before he shipped out. And that was not a long enough time. Because, because, because. By the time Mother was done, I was starting to wonder if I really had made the whole thing up. I started to wonder if I had seen my dad in the VA hospital just an hour earlier. I felt terrible. Mother must have seen that. She smiled, as books like to say, not unkindly , and said, “OK. Who’s ready for some mac and cheese?”