He appeared around the open door. “Hi, Ma.” His backpack thunked down in its customary spot: in the way.
“Oh, hi, yourself. You know what I said about the swearing—”
“But you do it all the time!”
“I do not swear ‘all the time,’” I said. “And you know it. Only when it’s really the best word for the situation. One of these days, you’ll need a fat, juicy swear word for the occasion, and all yours will be used up. Save it for when life get really tough.”
He flung himself down into the chair opposite me. I was bent over the laptop, but on alert immediately. He was sitting? Down? I checked the clock. Usually he reserved this golden hour for vendettas against video game ninjas.
“Life already sucks,” he said, resting his head in his fists, face turned toward the tabletop. “How much worse do you need it to get?”
“I didn’t get any calls today from the school,” I tried, each word leaving my mouth with a calculated effort at lightness.
He raised his head and gave me a twitchy sneer that might have turned into a smile if he weren’t so determined to remain sullen. “Funny, Mom. Really, really funny.”
I reached for a batch of paperwork on the table and started to flick through it. Casual, casual. “Is something going on?”
He was silent, face down for so long that I wondered if I hadn’t walked too directly into the topic. But then he sighed and emerged from behind his arms. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You could try me.” Now I turned the in-box upside down on the table and began to sort. The cell phone bill, unearthed just in time. My hands nearly shook from the effort of not looking at him. I was the one who had made his life difficult. Could I take a direct hit, if he said so? “I might understand,” I said.
“Never mind.”
“Oh.” In my hands, an expired rebate form, a notice of a tenants’ meeting I’d missed. I really needed to get it together. If I hadn’t already known it, here was the physical evidence I was losing control over the order of my life. “Why?”
“Why what?” he mumbled, arms crossed, knees jangling. He watched me dig through the stacks.
“Why ‘never mind’? Is it guy stuff? I wouldn’t understand because it’s guy stuff?”
He replied with a snort.
I tried again. “I wouldn’t understand because . . .”
“Mom, whatever. You just wouldn’t understand, that’s all. It’s not guy stuff. What’s guy stuff? Just. That’s it. Whatever. You wouldn’t understand because you’re my mom.”
“Oh.” I considered arguing my position, but then I didn’t know what my position was. “I guess you’re right, because I don’t understand what you mean.”
“See?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Exactly.”
The exchange brought back the efficient shorthand at the sheriff’s office. Joshua and I were having our own kind of half conversation, far less successfully.
“I’m still willing to listen.”
“Mom.” It was less a word than exhale. “You won’t think it’s hard at all. It will be all easy for you.”
“Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.” And I did. Leave him, Theresa would say, had said already when no one else would. You can stay at my place. As though moving a mile away changed anything. “Some things, you have to make your own decision.”
“Yeah.” He leaned forward for a moment and then collapsed low into the chair, more despondent than ever. “I have to figure it out for myself.”
“Well, no, that’s not exactly right,” I said. “You could take the advice other people have for you. Sometimes others can see things in a way you can’t. But—but you may not believe them. Or deep down, you will, and you’ll hate them for being right.” I stopped. Who needed this advice more?
He was still listening.
“Eventually,” I said, clearing my throat, “you’ll make your own decision. But it doesn’t hurt to try your problems out on other people, like, like a referendum on what you should do. Do you know—”
“Yes, I know what it means. Social studies class, you know?”
“Exactly. Just like social studies class.”
Joshua sat chewing on his bottom lip. I picked up a large, flat envelope that had fallen to the floor, just to have something to hold onto.
He leapt to his feet. “What’s for dinner?”
The referendum would not come to a vote today. I felt the immediate loss of his attention. “I don’t know yet. Is there something you wanted?”
“Can we have something good? We never have anything good.” He sat back down, pushed the chair from the table, and swiveled the chair from side to side.
“What are you talking about? We just had burgers last night. You ate about six pounds of them, so don’t tell me they weren’t good. Did you bring this in?”
“What?” He stopped the chair’s tilt-a-whirl spin and looked at the envelope I held aloft.
“It doesn’t have a stamp on it.” Without postage, it couldn’t be from Kent. And his human resources job, now that I thought about it, was probably the Chicago CEO’s threat I’d already received. They were sorting through disgruntled employees to find the author of that note. That was human resources. So what was this?
I was by nature paranoid, but I’d also heard unlikely stories from Kent and others that came back to me at times like these. Mail without stamps—that seemed to dredge up some warning I’d heard. Like email from people you didn’t know, with their unsolicited attachments. Computer viruses or—something. This envelope could have its own kind of attachment. I dropped the envelope, and before I could say anything, Joshua picked it up. “I’ll throw it away,” he said.
“No!”
He looked up, startled. I stood and grabbed the envelope from him.
“What? Why?”
I rubbed the open flap of the envelope with a finger and then peered at my fingertip.
“You are so weird,” he said.
“I work with the FBI and the police, Joshua. You know that. I have to be careful.”
“Like someone would be after you,” he said. “Who would be after you, Ma?” He rose and stretched tall, taking a swat at the ceiling to see if he could reach it yet. “Air ball.” With a squinting glance over his shoulder, he made for his bedroom.
I waited for the click of his door, and then sat back down with the envelope. The label was typed, but then every label I ever got was typed. No return address, no postage. Someone had left this for me at our mailbox or at the front door of the building.
Who would be after me?
The kid had no idea how much worse his life could be.
I shook the envelope over the table, watching for flecks of powder. I sniffed at it, holding it out several inches. Finally I reached in for the single sheet of folded paper inside. Standard-sized copy paper. White, no watermark.
Before I shook the paper loose, I knew. A call in the night. A stranger on the street using an old name. The tourist magazine. Around and around we went.
Chapter Thirteen