HOME | DD

Description
When that boy left, he left Mama a wreck. She sat in that creaky old kitchen rocker, her thin hair disheveled above  clammy, transluscent skin, her black, birdlike eyes glittering like beetles, sunken and strange in her pale face.  She moaned whenever anyone passed, but without looking at them, her hands in frantic and mechanical motion knitting row after row of snarled thread. "I let that boy into my house!" she muttered. Occasionally she would get up and pace back and forth across the kitchen, restlessly wiping at various surfaces with a greying little dish towel clutched in her bony fingers.

Then Joey and I  went off to school, and she was alone in the big house, filling the silence only with her own mutterings and the anxious clicking of her knitting needles. The neighbors would grab our sleeve on our way out sometimes, and ask if she was still alive in there, because she never showed her face.

One day, when I drove down to visit Mama, I found her standing over the stove, boiling sheets and dresses in her enormous cooking pot. She didn't look up when I came in, but just frantically continued seasoning the linens with pinches of salt and oregano.  "They're not done yet," she whispered, and she turned towards me, her wide eyes like buttons in her white face. "They're still raw."

After that, Joey and I decided it was best to put her in a home. She was 57 years old when we moved her to assisted living, but from her looks you'd have given her at least another 20 years. Her skin was greyed, the lines in her face and hands were sharp, and her thin hair was a course gray, peppered over with strands of sinewy white. Mama died of a stroke when she was only 60 years old, and to be frank with you I attribute most all of this to Joey, and me, and what happened with that Carter boy.

It all began early one warm, lavendar June evening. Joey and I were on our way back from the hardware store, where we'd been picking up hammer and nails to replace the part of the front stairs that had rotted in the unusually heavy summer rains. We were trodding languidly along the tarmac, battering away the ocassional dragonfly with the backs of our hands, when we saw the boy.

Seated on the curb, his head bowed, was a boy in dusty jeans and a red flannel shirt, looking down intently at something. He was unfamiliar to us, which was unusual because we knew just about all the village boys in our little town of Benson. "Hey there," Joey called out in a friendly way, and as we approached, the boy turned his face up to look at us.

We were struck as an old tree in a thunderstorm. His face was strange, wondrous even, in its unfamiliarity: fine, careful features, blushless cheeks made all the more striking by his white-blond hair, thin, bow-line lips, a delicate, angular nose. Most unusual, however, were the pale blue eyes, still and unblinking, that met our gaze with a confidence that was almost an indifference, an interest that was almost a coldness. He was breathetaking in his alienness, yet something about his stillness, his unwavering gaze, was oddly disquieting. So taken were we by the boy's face that we were stopped in front of him before we even noticed the holes in his shoes, or the deck of cards perched in long, sculpted fingers.

The boy did not answer Joey. After a good long gaze at both of us, he turned his attention back down to the deck of cards and did not look up again. Then, all at once, before our eyes, the cards began to flip and dance, leaping in long arcs and rippling through the air. The cards seemed bewitched as they leapt and landed like music, his hands fascinating in the simple ease of their movements. We forgot completely the boy's face and stared, carefully at first but then openly at the cards sailed, hypnotized by the magic of those hands.

"Wow," said Joey finally, as a trail of backflipping cards landed in a neat stack in the boy's right hand. I looked at Joey, and our eyes met. What do you say?  Joey's eyes asked implicitly. Yes, let's I communicated with a deft, subtle nod.

You see, in those days, whenever we brought someone home for dinner unexpectedly, Mama would take out whatever dessert she had made for her book club that weekend and serve it for the sake of said unexpected guest. Naturally, Joey and I were in the habit of inviting anyone we even vaguely liked for dinner if we crossed paths with them towards evening time, in order to get our hands on Mama's delicious baking.

So it was that we came to ask the boy if he had eaten yet, and if he wanted to come have dinner at our house. Had we not been such gluttons for our mother's carefully crafted, crisp peach cobblers and sweet blueberry pies, perhaps she would still be around now. But as it was, our stomachs were beginning to grumble, the sun was sinking fast, and we were quite drawn in by the boy's surprising card agility, so that any initial feeling of unease was cast aside and he was soon shuffling silently down through the damp grass of our front yard to our half-rotten front steps.

Description
When that boy left, he left Mama a wreck. She sat in that creaky old kitchen rocker, her thin hair disheveled above  clammy, transluscent skin, her black, birdlike eyes glittering like beetles, sunken and strange in her pale face.  She moaned whenever anyone passed, but without looking at them, her hands in frantic and mechanical motion knitting row after row of snarled thread. "I let that boy into my house!" she muttered. Occasionally she would get up and pace back and forth across the kitchen, restlessly wiping at various surfaces with a greying little dish towel clutched in her bony fingers.

Then Joey and I  went off to school, and she was alone in the big house, filling the silence only with her own mutterings and the anxious clicking of her knitting needles. The neighbors would grab our sleeve on our way out sometimes, and ask if she was still alive in there, because she never showed her face.

One day, when I drove down to visit Mama, I found her standing over the stove, boiling sheets and dresses in her enormous cooking pot. She didn't look up when I came in, but just frantically continued seasoning the linens with pinches of salt and oregano.  "They're not done yet," she whispered, and she turned towards me, her wide eyes like buttons in her white face. "They're still raw."

After that, Joey and I decided it was best to put her in a home. She was 57 years old when we moved her to assisted living, but from her looks you'd have given her at least another 20 years. Her skin was greyed, the lines in her face and hands were sharp, and her thin hair was a course gray, peppered over with strands of sinewy white. Mama died of a stroke when she was only 60 years old, and to be frank with you I attribute most all of this to Joey, and me, and what happened with that Carter boy.

It all began early one warm, lavendar June evening. Joey and I were on our way back from the hardware store, where we'd been picking up hammer and nails to replace the part of the front stairs that had rotted in the unusually heavy summer rains. We were trodding languidly along the tarmac, battering away the ocassional dragonfly with the backs of our hands, when we saw the boy.

Seated on the curb, his head bowed, was a boy in dusty jeans and a red flannel shirt, looking down intently at something. He was unfamiliar to us, which was unusual because we knew just about all the village boys in our little town of Benson. "Hey there," Joey called out in a friendly way, and as we approached, the boy turned his face up to look at us.

We were struck as an old tree in a thunderstorm. His face was strange, wondrous even, in its unfamiliarity: fine, careful features, blushless cheeks made all the more striking by his white-blond hair, thin, bow-line lips, a delicate, angular nose. Most unusual, however, were the pale blue eyes, still and unblinking, that met our gaze with a confidence that was almost an indifference, an interest that was almost a coldness. He was breathetaking in his alienness, yet something about his stillness, his unwavering gaze, was oddly disquieting. So taken were we by the boy's face that we were stopped in front of him before we even noticed the holes in his shoes, or the deck of cards perched in long, sculpted fingers.

The boy did not answer Joey. After a good long gaze at both of us, he turned his attention back down to the deck of cards and did not look up again. Then, all at once, before our eyes, the cards began to flip and dance, leaping in long arcs and rippling through the air. The cards seemed bewitched as they leapt and landed like music, his hands fascinating in the simple ease of their movements. We forgot completely the boy's face and stared, carefully at first but then openly at the cards sailed, hypnotized by the magic of those hands.

"Wow," said Joey finally, as a trail of backflipping cards landed in a neat stack in the boy's right hand. I looked at Joey, and our eyes met. What do you say?  Joey's eyes asked implicitly. Yes, let's I communicated with a deft, subtle nod.

You see, in those days, whenever we brought someone home for dinner unexpectedly, Mama would take out whatever dessert she had made for her book club that weekend and serve it for the sake of said unexpected guest. Naturally, Joey and I were in the habit of inviting anyone we even vaguely liked for dinner if we crossed paths with them towards evening time, in order to get our hands on Mama's delicious baking.

So it was that we came to ask the boy if he had eaten yet, and if he wanted to come have dinner at our house. Had we not been such gluttons for our mother's carefully crafted, crisp peach cobblers and sweet blueberry pies, perhaps she would still be around now. But as it was, our stomachs were beginning to grumble, the sun was sinking fast, and we were quite drawn in by the boy's surprising card agility, so that any initial feeling of unease was cast aside and he was soon shuffling silently down through the damp grass of our front yard to our half-rotten front steps.