Thank you.
So then Adam’s father found a new woman to have marriage with, and Zeb was born. Now little Adam was not lonely, because he had a brother. And Adam and Zeb helped each other. But Zeb’s father was sometimes hurtful to them.
I don’t know why. He thought pain was good for children.
No, he was not as bad as the two bad men who were hurtful to Amanda. But he was not a kind person.
I don’t know why some people then were not kind. It was a thing of the chaos.
And Zeb’s mother was often taking a nap, or doing other things that interested her. She was not very interested in small children. And she said, “You will be the death of me.”
Death of me is hard to explain. It meant she was displeased with the things they were doing.
No, Zeb did not kill his mother. Death of me is just a thing she said. She said it a lot.
Why did she say it if it wasn’t true? It was … those people talked that way. It wasn’t true or not true. It was in between. It was a way of telling about a feeling you might have. It was a manner of speaking. A manner of speaking means …
You are right. Zeb’s mother was not a kind person either. Sometimes she helped Zeb’s father lock Zeb up in a closet.
Lock up means … closet means … It was a very small room and it was dark in there, and Zeb couldn’t get out. Or they thought he couldn’t get out. But soon Zeb learned a lot about opening closed doors.
No. His mother couldn’t sing. Not like your mothers. And your fathers. And you.
But Zeb could sing. That is one of the things he did when he was locked inside the closet. He sang.
The PetrOleum Brats
Zeb’s mother, Trudy, was the goody-goody, and Adam’s mother, Fenella, was the shag-anything trashbunny. Or that was the story told by Trudy and the Rev. Since the two of them claimed that Zeb was so freaking useless and they were so righteous, naturally he thought he’d been adopted, since he couldn’t possibly have come from two such pristine sources of DNA as them.
He used to daydream that he’d been left behind by Fenella, who must have been his real, worthless mother. She’d been forced to flee in a hurry, and hadn’t been able to tote him along when she was running away – she’d dropped him on the doorstep in a cardboard box, to be taken in and trodden underfoot by this Trudy person, who was unrelated to him and lying about it. Fenella – wherever she was – deeply regretted her abandonment of him, and was planning to come back and get him once she could manage it. Then they would go far, far away together, and do absolutely everything on the long list of things that were frowned upon by the Rev. He saw them sitting on a park bench together, eating licorice twists and happily picking their noses. Just for instance.
But that was when he was little. Once he figured out genetics, he decided that Trudy must’ve secretly had it off with some fix-it guy with a wrench who doubled as a housebreaker and petty thief. Or else a gardener: she used to snaffle illegal Tex-Mex guys with black hair, like Zeb’s. She’d pay them not enough to wheelbarrow soil around, dig up shrubs, dump more rocks on her rock garden, which was the only thing that really held her attention in the way of nurturing and tending, as far as Zeb could tell. She was always out there with one of those little fork-tongued weeders or messing up ant nests with hot vinegar.
“ ’Course I could have inherited the criminality from the Rev, he had the chromosomes for it,” says Zeb. “He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable, whereas I was the real raw deal. He was furtive and sly, I was right in the face.”
“Don’t be too down on yourself,” says Toby.
“You don’t get it, babe,” says Zeb. “I’m bragging.”