Unfortunate Son
by Shelly Renee Muir © 2007
Speaking to his mother, Austin sold the Army better than any commercial. She wasn't buying it, though.
“I'm all alone, I'll have no one,” Linda said, sniffling and worrying the snot rag in her hand. It was an embarrassing scene, or would have been if anyone else had been there to see it. He wished the place didn't smell like popcorn and cigarettes. The summertime heat didn't improve it any. Only after he'd come back from basic had he noticed.
He stared at the stains on the wood paneling, the ceiling. Years of his father's smoking. “You've been my whole life ever since he's been gone,” she said, as though aware of whom, if not what, Austin had been thinking.
He was going to say, “That's not true,” but maybe it was, such a life as she'd been living it.
God, he couldn't really explain it any further...
#
She was sitting on the red leaf maple rocker. His father--Coop, everyone called him, though his name was Richard--had made it himself.
“Dad knew,” he said. She straightened with soap opera-wide eyes, mascara running and everything. “He knew it was the best possible thing for me. I can't stay here, mom. He made me promise to write you every week. He told me to remind you to write back, too, to send me your oatmeal raisin cookies and--” Prude, perhaps, but he couldn't get himself to say, “Playboys.” She was blinking at him like a child.
“That's why you wanted to be alone with him that day,” she said, her voice hollow, her fingers stroking the arm of the chair, like someone petting a weak cat, afraid to touch it. “To tell him. And then you didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me, Austin?”
He opened his mouth but had no answer. In his mind's eye he saw his father, smiling.
#
“You'll be fine,” he said, running his eyes over the paperbacks on the shelves--God, they needed dusting--the sad, dirty drapes, the kernel-strewn floor that needed vacuuming. “And I couldn't do it if I didn't know dad was going to be with me. I'll be wearing his St. Christopher medal till it's grafted to my skin. He's watching out for me. I'm one fortunate son.”
#
She stroked her chin, mouth open, gray November light slanting between the curtain gap in the window. Smoke swirled in a thin trail from the cigarette in her hand. She had nodded off, for just a moment. House fires start that way, she thought. It didn't give her the fear she thought it would, though. There was nothing to fear, anymore. Everything was going to be fine--Austin had said so.
Now who, she thought, jerking out of her chair, could that be knocking at her door?