Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“My mother sent me? She said you needed help?” His voice rose at the end of both sentences, turning them into questions, and he wished that he could start over, could reenter the house making declarations.

“Come here and let us take a look at you,” said Mr. Bergstrom, gesturing vaguely toward the middle of the room.

Aaron bent to remove his sneakers, which were covered with snow, and Mrs. Bergstrom said, “What a polite young man.”

He came and stood in front of them, and they regarded him without speaking. Then they turned and looked at each other, thoughtfully, as though Aaron were an appliance that they were considering buying, an appliance that offered some but not all the features that they wanted in their appliance. The look that they gave each other seemed to say, “Well, shall we take him anyway? Can we make do?”

“How old are you, Aaron?” asked Mrs. Bergstrom.

“Twelve,” he said quietly. “Almost thirteen.”

They waited, perhaps expecting him to comment on his impending puberty — to describe his first whisker or the new muskiness beneath his arms — and when he did not, Mrs. Bergstrom said, “Well, it’s time for the news, so why don’t we let Father watch while we work on our letter.” She told Aaron to turn on the television, and he did, the newscaster’s voice exploding into the room. She extricated herself from the afghan, and Aaron saw that she had on snow pants, as though she had just come in from an afternoon of sledding. She wiggled herself to the front of the sofa and concentrated, staring straight ahead before she hoisted herself to her feet with a small grunt that embarrassed him.

“Let’s settle ourselves in the den,” Mrs. Bergstrom said. He followed her down the hallway, her snow pants making a phit, phit sound as she walked, and into the den, where she locked the door behind them. The room smelled of cedar, which he liked, and wet cardboard, which he did not. On the wall above the sofa were photos of their son, Tim, their dead son, one from each year of school, lined up chronologically. He was smiling in all of them, and the gap between his front teeth seemed bigger than it had in person. There were no photos of him as an adult, but Aaron remembered him as a sad-looking man who came into the café alone and took a cloth from his pocket to clean the cutlery before using it. He had never ordered anything but water to drink, which Aaron’s mother said had to do with his inability to keep a job for long, which meant he could not afford to drink pop, and he always had a bacon cheeseburger, from which he would not take a bite until he had uncrossed the two strips of bacon arranged in an X by Aaron’s mother because he preferred his bacon parallel.

The morning after Tim fell through the ice, the café was exceptionally busy. Aaron came down late, so he did not know what was going on, only that something was, for the tables and booths were filled, the room buzzing.

“Something happened,” his mother told him later. She explained haltingly that this something involved the Bergstroms, who had called the police the night before because Tim had stopped by to visit them and was acting strange.

“Strange how?” Aaron asked.

“He kept telling them he loved them,” his mother said.

Aaron considered this: the fact that the Bergstroms had called the police because their son would not stop saying that he loved them. “They called the police because he wouldn’t stop?” he said at last.

“Well,” his mother said. “There was more to it than that.”

The police had come, pulling up in front of the Bergstroms’ house as Tim was driving away. They flashed their lights, but he did not stop, and like a parade of two, Tim and the police drove slowly through Mortonville and out of town. When Tim turned onto the dirt road that led to one of the lakes, the lake where people in Mortonville went to swim, the police sensed that something was wrong. They began running the siren and speaking to him over the loudspeaker, but he drove straight onto the frozen surface. The lakes had been tricky that year, with soft spots everywhere, which meant that even people who knew them well were staying off, so the police watched from the shore as Tim continued out toward the middle alone. Eventually, his headlights lurched upward, and within minutes he was gone. “You understand what I’m telling you, Aaron?” his mother said.

“Yes,” he said.

“They can’t get to the car. It’s too dangerous.” She tore open a packet of sugar and let it dissolve in her coffee. “Imagine how cold it must have been.”

* * *

He and Mrs. Bergstrom sat down at a card table, atop of which was a half-completed puzzle, the picture side facing down. He studied the gray backside of the puzzle for a moment, wanting to say, “This puzzle puzzles me,” but he was not the sort of boy who engaged in silliness with others. He used to say such things to his mother, who had been sincere in her reactions, laughing only when she truly found something funny, but it struck him one day that his mother was no longer listening.

“Why are you putting the puzzle together upside down?” he asked Mrs. Bergstrom. “Wouldn’t it be easier if you could see the picture?”

“Why must everything be easy, young man?” She pushed the puzzle aside and drew a wooden box toward her, opening it to reveal stationery and pens. “How’s your penmanship?” she asked, and he said that his penmanship was fine. “Good,” she said. “I’m not interested in faulty penmanship. And your spelling?”

“I have the best spelling in my class,” he reported.

“Well,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, “that only means something if the class is not made up of imbeciles.” She removed the top sheet of paper from the box and put it in front of him. “I assume your mother told you that I require assistance with my correspondence.”

“Yes,” he said. He glanced at her hands, which looked capable of holding a pen.

“Dear,” she began dictating, and then stopped as though she could not recall to whom she had planned to write. “Just leave it blank for now,” she instructed before resuming her dictation: “Winter has arrived in Mortonville.”

She picked up the paper and examined it. “You must work on your uppercase letters,” she told him severely, pointing to the W specifically. “The bottoms should be sharp, like two elbows resting on the line. You see how rounded yours are? You’ve made knees of them, as though they are kneeling. I do not approve of kneeling,” she said. “We are not Catholics in this house.” She laughed as though this were funny.

“Should I fix it?” he asked.

“That would just make it unsightly,” she said, “and the first line, in particular, should not be unsightly. No, we’ll leave it, but it’s something to bear in mind.”

He held the pen above the paper, waiting for her to continue.

“You seem like a perspicacious young man,” she said, her tongue darting into the corners of her mouth as she studied him, slyly, wanting to know whether he would ask what perspicacious meant, wanting to know, that is, whether his curiosity would trump his timidity, for he understood that she saw him that way, as a timid boy who would put up with being bullied by an old lady in her den.

Of course, he knew what perspicacious meant, but he did not know how to convey this to her or whether she would make too much of his doing so. “I know what perspicacious means,” he blurted out finally.

She chuckled. “Good,” she said. “Because I want to show you something.”

They stood, and she unlocked and opened the door. The television in the living room was still loud, but she held a finger to her lips as they tiptoed down the hallway to the next door. She opened it, and he felt her hand on his arm, pushing him inside, into the darkness. The door shut. He heard it locking, her hand fluttering against the wall until she found the light switch.