Richard Ford - Wildlife

‘Be kind to me,’ my mother said. ‘Would you be kind to me? I know it’ll make everything better. You can think bad things, but don’t say them.’

‘Yes, I will,’ I said.

She turned as though she was going to go back to the bedroom. But she reached toward me as she did, and patted me on my shoulder. She said, ‘You’re a sweet boy. You’re like your father.’

She left me in the kitchen and went into her room to get herself ready to leave. I still wanted to ask her if she loved my father. I thought I would have an easier time being kind to her if I knew that. But sitting at the kitchen table there, alone, I didn’t feel like I could shout it out, and didn’t want to go into her room again. So I had to make myself satisfied with not knowing, since we never talked about that subject afterward.

After a few minutes, she came back through the kitchen on her way out. She had brushed her hair and put on lipstick and perfume. She was wearing a red winter coat and had found her purse and the car keys where I had hung them beside the door the night before. She came to where I was still sitting at the table, looking at the headlines on the front page of the Tribune without really reading them, and she put her arms around my neck and she hugged me hard and quickly. I could smell the perfume on her neck. Her face felt hard against my face, and she had been smoking a cigarette that morning. She said, ‘Your life doesn’t mean what you have, sweetheart, or what you get. It’s what you’re willing to give up. That’s an old saying, I know. But it’s still true. You need to have something to give up. Okay?’

‘What if you don’t want to give up anything?’ I said.

‘Oh, well. Good luck. You have to.’ She smiled and kissed me again. ‘That’s really not one of the choices. You have to give things up. That’s the rule. It’s the major rule for everything.’

She went out the back door and across the cold yard toward whatever else the day would be likely to bring her way.

When she had been gone for a while and I’d finished reading the newspaper, I went back and got in my bed and tried to read my book on throwing the javelin, looked at the drawings of muscular men in all stages of the throw, but I couldn’t make myself think about that. And then I thought I should go to sleep again because when I woke up I would have to think about what I was going to do. I believed I would probably leave town that day, and that my mother and I had said good-bye but hadn’t exactly known it. Though I did not want to hurry, inasmuch as I didn’t know where to go at all, or how I would get there, or if I would ever come back. And that seemed in itself like a loss — not the leaving, but having to decide where to go and how to get there and what it all would cost me. The details were the loss. And I thought I knew what my mother meant by what she’d said about giving things up, and that she was right. And what I thought about as I fell asleep in my bed late in that morning was loss and how I would get along with it alone and what I had of myself that I was willing to lose.

When I woke up again it was three o’clock. I had slept five hours and missed all of school for that day. I felt like I might not be going to school anymore and not to college either. I didn’t see how that could be, but I felt it was, and I would not be surprised if someone said as much to me soon. And I felt that maybe the best part of my life was over for me now, and other things were starting. I was almost seventeen.

I took a shower and put on clean clothes. It was cold in the house, and I went into the kitchen and turned the furnace up, and looked for some sign that my mother had been in the house again. Her plate was still in the sink and her coffee cup was on the countertop the way they had been. Out the back window in the yard, red-winged blackbirds were sitting all across the grass. My mother’s car was not in front of the house, though down Eighth, farther down than where it had been the night before and almost hidden behind our side hedge, Warren Miller’s pink Oldsmobile was sitting against the curb. No one was in it. Though even as I was looking, Warren Miller himself walked, limping, out from behind the hedge and up the sidewalk toward the front of our house, and through the gate and up our walk as if he was coming right in the house, just as if my mother was there waiting for him.

I stepped to the side of the door, and reached across and under and turned the lock closed. I could hear Warren Miller’s heavy steps on the porch as he came to the door. The ceiling light was on in the kitchen, and I knew he could see it and would think someone was inside. But I didn’t move, though my heart started to pound fast. I stayed with my face against the wall while Warren turned the bell on the door, turned it twice, and waited. I could see just part of him through the window glass, the front of his coat. I heard his feet move, heard the change jingle in his pockets. He took a coin out of his pocket and tapped it on the glass, and said, ‘Jenny, hon, are you inside? Are you inside there?’ He waited a few seconds, then turned the doorknob to walk in, but the lock stopped him. He pushed it twice and pulled it back — not hard, but firmly. I was no more than a foot from him, though the wall was between us. I heard him say, ‘Lord, Lord, Lord.’ Then he walked off the porch.

I looked around the window frame at him. He was walking around toward the side of our house. I turned and hurried back through the kitchen in my sock feet and locked the back door before he could get to it. Then I went back into the hall, exactly where I had seen him the night before when he hadn’t seen me. I listened to him tap on the door glass with his coin, then try the knob there, then go to the kitchen window and try it and find out it was locked. I heard him call my mother’s name again. Not in a frantic voice, but an insistent one, as though he knew I was inside hiding from him, in my own house, and wouldn’t let him in. I stayed in the hall listening while the furnace went on and off, heard him come to my mother’s window and try it, then heard him try my window. But both of them were locked. He tapped on my window. I knew he could see that my bed was not made, and that a towel from the bathroom was on the floor, and my shoes were there. I knew he knew I was there, and for that reason he might just break the glass and come in. But he didn’t. He tried my window again, tapped on it, then it was quiet from all I could hear in the shadowy hallway. I stood and listened, tried to hear his limping walk. But I couldn’t, though in a minute I thought I heard his car start down the street, heard the motor rev up high as if by accident. Then I heard nothing, no car sound, no sound at the door, no footsteps limping. And I thought he had finally gone away.

I walked down the hall and looked into my mother’s room, where I had not wanted to go. The bed was made up. There was a pillow on the floor and clothes pushed out of the closet, and the curtains were shut so that the room was shadowy and cool. The clock said that it was three forty-five in the afternoon. I walked into the room and turned on the ceiling light. And what I saw on the floor near the end of the bed was a pair of socks, gray and red nylon ones turned almost inside out and — it looked to me — thrown there maybe from the bed. I walked over and picked them up, then looked around the floor to see what else there might be. I looked under the pillow and under the bed, but didn’t see anything else — nothing that Warren Miller would want back or that my mother might want hidden. I took the socks into the kitchen and wrapped them in the newspaper that was on the table. Then I put the bundle in the trash under the sink and took the paper bag of trash out behind the house to the metal garbage can and put it in and went back in the house to put on my coat so I could go out into the town.