“I was troubled by this reading thing. Or I guess I should say lack of reading.”
Stewie felt an odd and uncomfortable stirring in his chest, like something that won’t lie flat so as to stop getting in your way. He figured it was anger, which was unfortunate. Kids don’t get to be angry at grown-ups.
All the same, his voice as even as possible, he did express his concerns.
“You told me you had a mind to do that. And before I could even say, ‘No, please don’t,’ you took one look at my face and said you knew by my face that I didn’t want you to. But then you went and did it anyway.”
“And you want to know why,” she said. A flat statement, not a question. She knew what he wanted from her.
She was still addressing the wall behind the stove, her back to him. That made things easier. Made it easier for him to talk. Maybe it was easier for her that way, too. Maybe that’s why she was doing it.
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Then I’ll tell you the truth, even though the truth doesn’t make me look very good. I forgot that exchange.”
“That what?”
“That moment when I realized I shouldn’t do it. I saw on your face that I shouldn’t, and then I went and forgot it. Just like I forgot to turn off the fire under my bacon. It just slipped out of my mind.”
He waited for a few beats, thinking she was about to say more. Specifically, that she was about to say she was sorry. He could almost hear it hanging in the air, waiting to be said. Wanting to be said. But it never came along.
“Well, that’s pretty honest,” he said. “I’m glad you brought it up so I didn’t have to.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Oh, you knew?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You saw me there, or they told you?”
“The principal told me. She said something like ‘I just had a talk with your grandmother.’ And I said, ‘My grandmother is dead. You know that. Everybody knows that.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, not that grandmother. Your other grandmother.’ And I said, ‘My other grandmother is dead a lot longer than that. Like, before I was born.’ And then she told me the name of the person who she just talked to, and I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I know her, but she’s not my grandmother.’”
Stewie looked up suddenly as the big shadow of Marilyn appeared over him. Her face looked wild with alarm. It made him feel panic as well.
“You said that? Why did you say that?”
“Because it’s true!”
“I know, but couldn’t you have just said I’m your grandmother? What would it have hurt you to say so?”
“Okay, it’s like this. If you need me to say something for some reason, I will. Even if it’s not true, if it doesn’t hurt anybody and you need me to do it, I will. But you have to tell me. How can I say what you want if I don’t even know what it is?”
She sank down into the chair next to him, her alarm fading and morphing into what looked like some sort of depressed dread. She dropped her face into her hands, one palm covering each eye.
“You’re right, of course,” she said.
That made Stewie feel a little more relaxed, despite her evident darkness. He still didn’t know what was so terribly wrong, but at least she wasn’t blaming him.
“I don’t see what the big deal is. I mean, you said you’re something, but you’re not. Kind of weird, but they can’t arrest you for that.”
“No,” she said, her voice oddly quiet. “They can’t arrest me for that.”
Stewie had no idea what to make of her comment, so he moved things in a different direction.
“It’s just so embarrassing,” he said. “Thinking about you sitting there with her, talking about how stupid I am.”
She did not remove her face from her hands as she spoke.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all. Nobody said you were stupid. Quite the opposite. She said you were a bright boy with a lot of interest in learning. But then things turned for you when you started having trouble at home.”
“They know that?”
“Of course they know it. Everybody knows your grandmother got sick and died.”
“But they know I couldn’t learn the same after that?”
“Of course.”
“How do they know that?”
“Because you’re not the only child it’s happened to. When we have trauma in our life, it affects everything. It’s a normal reaction to that stress.”
Stewie sat quietly for a moment, feeling those words settle in. Almost wanting to memorize them for whatever hard times might come later. Seemed there were always more hard times out there somewhere, waiting to move in.
“I still don’t really know why you went, though,” he said. “I mean, I get that you wanted to go, but there was a reason not to, but then you forgot the reason. But why did you want to go in the first place?”
“I told you. I was troubled by the reading situation. Children should be taught how to read.”
“All children? Or just me?”
“Well, of course all children. How could I possibly think that you’re the only child in the world who ought to be taught how to read?”
“But you’re not going to all their schools. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Obviously it makes a difference if the child is one I . . .”
But she trailed off. Just as she’d gotten to a sentence Stewie desperately wanted her to finish, she seemed disinclined to finish it.
“What? One you what?”
“You know what I’m trying to say.”
“Not really.”
“A child I take some interest in.”
The teakettle began to whistle. Marilyn only sat there with her face in her hands. She did not get up to tend it.
“Sounded like you were about to say I was somebody you care about.”
“Well, I’m not sure what exact words I was about to use.”
They fell quiet again—though it was not the least bit quiet in the kitchen with that noisy teakettle whistling. Stewie got up to turn off the fire under it, since it didn’t seem she had any intention of doing it.
“Okay,” he said in the blessed silence left behind after its shriek faded.
“Okay what?”
“If it’s really important to you that I learn to read better, then I will. But I really hope you’ll help me. Because it would be totally embarrassing to have to go to my English teacher and tell her I need her to teach me again everything she already taught everybody in the first place.”
“Yes, of course I’ll help.”
“Don’t you want to get up and make this hot water into tea?”
She still had her palms pressed over her eyes. She still hadn’t popped back from his news that the principal knew she had lied about being his grandmother.
Maybe grown-ups get embarrassed too, he thought.
But she had made some cryptic comment about arrest. It had been impossible to understand, though—he simply did not know enough about what was going on in her head to know how she’d meant it—so he pushed it out of his mind again and tried to focus on the lesson at hand.
There were four more reading lessons. Exactly four, over the same number of days, if you count the one that was interrupted. Stewie chose to count that one when he looked back on the lessons.
During the fourth lesson, it happened.
They were sitting together at the kitchen table, working on chapter four of the mouse book. The mouse with human parents and Stewie’s name. Marilyn had asked him to point out all the words he didn’t know. He had the book turned toward her, but angled so that he could just barely see it, and he was running his finger down the page, pointing to any word he couldn’t understand.
Before he could reach the end of the page, Marilyn said something that hurt him.
She said, “My goodness, son.” She had taken to calling him son. He suspected she might have forgotten his name, which also hurt. “It would be faster if you just pointed to the ones you could read.”
He went silent then, and tried not to let on that he had been hurt.
To make matters worse, Izzy came stomping into the kitchen with her usual complaints.
“You never play with me anymore! I want to play something!”
Stewie didn’t answer, because he was busy being wounded and keeping it to himself.
She turned her scathing attention to Marilyn.