Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“I can’t do it,” Aaron whispered to his mother.

“It’s like walking down stairs,” she said. He knew this was not true.

“You go now,” the Finn told him, the light on his helmet shining into Aaron’s eyes. “It’s not hard,” he added in a kind voice, and Aaron knew the Damn Finn had seen that he was crying. Below them, the others were getting restless.

“Aaron, get your ass on this ladder now or I’m coming back up there and we’ll see if a good spanking won’t help,” said his father from the darkness. The others stopped talking, and without their chatter the mine seemed vast. With the Damn Finn’s help, Aaron knelt, his right foot reaching down for the top rung. A hand seized his ankle. He kicked, but his father held on, pulling him into the darkness.

His sheets were tangled around his legs. He worked himself free, got out of bed, and tipped the photograph forward, bringing his father face-to-face with the nightstand. He found his mother sitting at the kitchen table with the map of Fargo-Moorhead open before her. She could no longer go anywhere near the parade route, which had turned simple errands into full-day events that began here at the table with his mother marking out a route and ended with them driving in circles through newly developed neighborhoods that did not exist on the map.

“You need shoes,” his mother said. “Remember, school starts Monday.” The very thought of starting kindergarten filled him with dread. It was not that he did not want to learn. He did, but he did not want to sit in a room full of other children to do so. “Go get dressed,” his mother said.

“I like my shoes,” he said, but he did not argue because after the funeral Uncle Petey had pulled him aside. “The doctor says your mother needs lots of peace and quiet,” Uncle Petey told him, in a tone suggesting that peace and quiet was something he believed a boy Aaron’s age could not provide. Aaron wondered when the doctor had said this to his mother. She hadn’t been sick. It was true that she slept a lot, but that was something she did not do when she was sick because she always said that the best medicine was having him sit by her bed and tell her things.

He went into his bedroom and put on his pants, dividing the pennies between his front pockets. Then he sat on the floor and wiggled his feet into his shoes. They had become tighter, but that did not change the fact that these were the shoes with which he had kicked Paul Bunyan. He could not imagine starting school without them.

* * *

The store carried only children’s shoes and was decorated to appeal to its audience: a carousel horse stood out front, its coin slot filled with gum, and just inside the door was a gumball machine, flanked by dusty statues of Buster Brown and his dog, whose tail had been broken off and propped against his leg. When they entered, a bell above the door rang.

“And what can we help you with today?” the saleswoman called out to them.

“Aaron is starting school next week,” his mother told the woman.

“Starting school?” the woman said, bending toward him. “And what grade are you going to be in, young man?”

Aaron looked up at the woman. Everything about her was exaggerated — the tone of her voice, the redness of her lipstick, the puff of her hair — each feature rivaling the others like choir members who had decided to out-sing one another. He put his hands in his pockets, letting the pennies trickle through his fingers. “Kindergarten,” he said.

“Kindergarten!” the woman repeated, making her eyes large as if to suggest that meeting a boy about to start kindergarten was rare indeed in her line of work.

“Do you carry cowboy boots?” he asked.

“We do,” she replied, looking at his mother for guidance.

“Absolutely not,” his mother said. “I’m not going to spend all day polishing boots.”

“I would polish them,” Aaron mumbled.

His mother picked up a pair of dress shoes, checked the price, and held them out to him. “Now aren’t these nice?” she said. Aaron looked at them. They were not nice.

“That’s a really snazzy pair,” the saleswoman said. “They’ve been very popular with boys your age.”

Aaron succumbed to the process, allowing the woman to pry off his old shoes, measure his foot, and lace him into a pair of the cheap dress shoes.

“How do they feel?” his mother asked. He stood and paced for her, realizing that the carpet was so worn because all day long other children did as he was doing, walked back and forth while their mothers looked on. His mother and the saleswoman took turns pressing on the toes. “I guess we’ll take them,” his mother said, sighing as she got to her feet, and he could tell then that she did not think the cheap dress shoes were nice either.

“I like them,” he declared.

They moved to the counter, where the saleswoman wound a length of string around the shoebox while chatting about the weather. His mother stood writing a check, her lips moving as though she were dictating the information to her hand. In the past, she had been able to carry on a conversation while writing checks, but lately most tasks required her full concentration so that even when she did get out of bed to make supper, for example, she no longer invited him to cook with her, did not show him how to measure salt in the palm of his hand or check the temperature of the roast.

“Looks like we’ll have a lot of rhubarb this year,” the saleswoman said.

“I used to make rhubarb crisp,” his mother told the woman as she handed her the check.

“I love crisp,” the woman replied. “May I see your driver’s license?”

His mother fumbled with her purse. “Of course, that was before the parade,” she said, handing the woman her license.

The woman began copying information onto the check. “The parade?”

Aaron looked at his mother. Large, evenly spaced tears rolled down her cheeks, what she called “crocodile tears” when he produced them. Once, she had pretended to catch his crocodile tears with a needle and thread, stringing them into a necklace. She had done it to make him laugh, but his mother no longer seemed to be thinking about his laughter.

“Yes, the parade,” his mother said.

He backed away, feigning interest in a pair of Hush Puppies.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what parade you’re talking about, dear,” the saleswoman said. She returned his mother’s license and pivoted toward the cash register.

“The parade,” his mother screamed. The woman jerked back around. “The parade,” she said again, this time with quiet authority. “Don’t you know anything?” She shook her head as though she pitied the woman and then rested it on the counter, atop the nest that she’d made of her arms.

Everything that happened next would remain in Aaron’s memory as a set of images and sounds, devoid of chronology. He knew that the saleswoman had called to him repeatedly, “Young man, there’s something wrong with your mother,” and that he had stood with his back to them, focusing on the gumball machine by the door. He recalled the feel of his hands dipping repeatedly into his pockets, the way they seemed separate from him, not his own hands at all, and the things he told himself as he turned the metal crank of the machine, things like “If it’s blue, she’ll stop crying and we’ll go home.” He remembered the whirring as the saleswoman dialed the telephone and what she said first: “I’m calling to request medical assistance.” She said other things, but those things he did not remember because nothing had impressed him like that first sentence.

By the time the ambulance arrived, his pockets were empty, his dead-father pennies converted into bubblegum, which had formed a wad in his mouth the size of a Ping-Pong ball. “What’s your name, son?” one of the paramedics asked. Aaron stared up at the man, cheeks puffed out, lips pulled back menacingly. His jaw had gone numb, so he did not know that he was drooling, his spittle tinged green and pink and blue. With his pockets empty, he felt as though he might float away, so he stood very still, watching as they strapped his mother to a gurney and wheeled her to the ambulance and as the saleswoman ran after them with the cheap dress shoes. She returned looking satisfied, her transaction complete, but she saw him then and stopped.