Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

Shouldn’t one of his brothers have the canteen? Wouldn’t they be mad if they found out their mom gave it to him? He screws the top off and peeks carefully inside, as though a little bit of his dad might be distilled within.

“Mommy,” Sissy says from where she is lying on the carpet furiously coloring, her hair a shout of red-gold around her round, freckly face. Everything his baby sister does, she seems to do furiously. “Will you read to me now?”

His mom is strangely still, far away. It takes her at least a minute to answer. “Ask Luke, dear. I have to get started on dinner now. Mike and Patty Ann will be home soon.”

Mike has a full-time summer job bagging groceries at the Safeway. Patty Ann is waitressing at Peter B’s Galley, in the bowling alley. She got Luke a job in the alley also, on Friday and Saturday nights, plus Luke has taken over mowing the lawn for the church and rectory while Mike is bagging groceries. Next summer, his mom says, he should get a job, too: With you getting bigger, you’re going to want more pocket money. Anyhow, it’s important to learn how to work, as important as book learning.

Francis should get a job bagging groceries like Mike, Luke said. All the ladies will head for the register he’s working and tip him double if he carries their bags to their cars. He’ll earn enough for his own set of wheels twice as fast as Mike will.

Hush, his mom said, laughing. That’s no way to talk. He’s still a baby.

If anyone can set his mom laughing, it’s Luke. But he’s not a baby. He’s not a man, but he’s not a baby, either.

He stuffs the canteen into the top of his pants, bundles the two boxes up with string, and carries them, one by one, out to the car. He didn’t even understand what was so funny about what Luke said. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe it was Luke making fun of Mike somehow.

In the kitchen, his mom is trying to get the oven to light. The oven hasn’t worked properly for more than a year. Sissy follows him down the hall to his bedroom. “Read me this?” she says, climbing onto Luke’s bed and sticking the book in her hand between Luke’s face and novel.

Luke pushes the book’s bright green, red, yellow, and blue cover away. “I’m already reading something. And Goodnight Moon is a baby book. You’re not a baby.”

“I like it.”

“It’s a going-to-bed book.”

“Please, Luke.” Sissy crawls up beside him and tucks her bright head against his shoulder. “Luke, Luke, Lukie-Luke.”

Luke sighs and sets his book down.

He shoves the canteen under his mattress. It makes a big lump. His mom should have given the canteen to Mike. Mike plans to join the army in two years, or at least go ROTC. He may be the only one tall enough ever to wear his dad’s suits, but Mike’s the one who will be like their father.

“A bowl of mush?” Luke says, looking up from his reading. “Why is there mush in the room where the bunny is going to sleep, anyhow?”

He hastens to lie down over the lump the canteen has made in his mattress, to conceal it.

“What’s mush?” Sissy asks.

“Some gross thing Mom probably ate during the war when there was rationing.”

“What’s rationing?”

“What you should do with your questions.”

Sissy purses her little mouth. Her red locks stick up in the air. “So you mean mush is like tapioca pudding?”

“Exactly.”

“Hey!” Mike says, marching into the room in his grocery-store shirt, making straight for his piggy bank. Clink-clink goes his tip money. His big brother is saving to buy a car for college. Patty Ann is supposed to be saving her tips for use at college, too, but their mom says she wastes it on buying sodas and hamburgers for her good-for-nothing boyfriend. Luke spent most of his last paycheck on books, including two novels by Kurt Vonnegut. “Why aren’t you listening to the game? The Dodgers are playing the Mets.”

“That’s it, kiddo,” Luke says, dislodging Sissy. Baseball is one thing Luke and Mike never disagree about. Neither of them misses a game. “I’ll read the rest to you tonight before you go to sleep.”

“You’re almost done!”

“I’ll finish what I haven’t read after the game, and then I’ll read it all the way through again. Deal?”

Sissy smiles and jumps up. For a three-year-old, Sissy knows how to drive a good bargain.

Alone in the bedroom now, he extracts the canteen from under his mattress. The surface is smooth and silver in his hand, flat on two sides and rounded on the others, with small dents here and there where it must have banged hard against a Far Eastern rock or a ship deck. Only the chain securing the cap is rusted, a little bit along the seam where the curved top joins with the bottom.

It was once in his dad’s hands. His dad lifted it to his mouth and drank from it. Other soldiers may have, too.

“Aren’t you going to join your brothers listening to the game?” His mom stands in the doorway, watching him.

He slides the canteen back under his pillow. His mom is always trying to get him to do stuff with the others.

“Francis?”

His mom’s dark hair bounces gently against her chin. She tips her head and smiles at him. He can almost imagine her stepping off the pier herself, throwing herself into the air, way above the water, her sudden grin, the toss of her head. She’d be mighty unhappy if she knew he’d done it, though. People have killed themselves jumping off the pier.

“Okay, Mom.”

He follows her into the living room, sprawling on the floor next to Luke. Mike is sitting on the sofa with Sissy stretched out beside him.

By the third inning, his little sister has begun gently snoring. Even though it’s August, and warm, his mom lays a cotton blanket over her.

“I can’t believe it!” Mike says when the game ends. Through the open window, they can hear the next-door neighbor cursing: The Mets beat Koufax! The lousy Mets! Son of a bitch!

Sissy jumps up, pretending she wasn’t asleep, shaking her golden red sprouts of hair. She knocks over the framed photo of their family, that last one from Palm Sunday, his dad standing directly behind him with one hand on his shoulder, Sissy still in his mom’s tummy. He gets up onto his knees and rights it.

Luke clutches a pillow to his stomach and groans. “Who is this new pitcher, anyhow? Tug McGraw? Who’s ever heard of him? ”

“We’re going to hear about him now,” Mike says grimly.

His mom shuts the living room window against the neighbor’s shouting. “You didn’t hear that, I’m sure.” She looks meaningfully at Sissy. “Dinner is ready. Where has Patty Ann gotten to?”

“She’s not home yet?” Mike says.

“Uh…duh,” Luke says. “Like she could have gone through to the girls’ room without your seeing her.”

Mike ignores him. “I thought her shift was done at four today, like mine. That’s what she told me this morning.”

His two brothers look at each other. Whole blocks burned down in Watts. People were even killed.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Mike adds quickly. “Lee was picking Patty Ann up. Nothing could have happened to her.”

Lee is Patty Ann’s steady. Skinny and dark-haired, in jeans and boots even when it’s hot out, Lee’s only job this summer seems to be driving Patty Ann to work and taking her parking after. Their mom says the worst part about Patty Ann not getting a scholarship to Vassar is that it means not putting the whole of the United States of America between the two of them. She says if their father were still alive, he’d have sent Lee packing a long time ago. Their mom doesn’t like Lee much.

She and Patty Ann had a fight about him again just this morning: in fact, Lee is what they mostly fight about. At least CSU will get Patty Ann to a different part of town, his mom said after Patty Ann went running out the door into Lee’s Dodge Matador. With a different sort of boy.