No more trips to the butcher; the butcher closes anyway. By November,
Mother’s boarders are vanishing. Mr. Beeson goes first, then Mr. Fackler. Tom
waits for Ruby to comes to the door but she doesn’t show. Images of her climb
the undersides of his eyelids, and he rubs them away. Each morning he
clambers out of his closet and carries his traitorous heart down to the kitchen
like an egg.
***
The world is swallowing people like candy, boy, says Mr. Weems. No one is
leaving addresses.
Mr. Hanson goes next, then Mr. Heathcock. By April the saltworks is operating
only two days a week, and Mr. Weems, Mother, and Tom are alone at supper.
Sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Tom moves his few things into one of the empty
boarders’ rooms on the first floor, and Mother doesn’t say a word. He thinks of
Ruby Hornaday: her pale blue eyes, her loose flames of hair. Is she out there in
the city, somewhere, right now? Or is she three thousand miles away? Then he
sets his questions aside.
***
Mother catches a fever in 1932. It eats her from the inside. She still puts on her
high-waisted dresses, ties on her apron. She still cooks every meal and presses
Mr. Weems’s suit every Sunday. But within a month she has become somebody
else, an empty demon in Mother’s clothes—perfectly upright at the table, eyes
smouldering, nothing on her plate.
She has a way of putting her hand on Tom’s forehead while he works. Tom will
be hauling coal or mending a pipe or sweeping the parlour, the sun cold and
white behind the curtains, and Mother will appear from nowhere and put her icy
palm over his eyebrows, and he’ll close his eyes and feel his heart tear just a
little more.
Amphibian. It means two lives.
Mr. Weems is let go. He puts on his suit, packs up his dominoes, and leaves an
address downtown.
I thought no one was leaving addresses.
You’re true as a map, Tom. True as the magnet to the iron. And tears spill from
the old miner’s eyes.
One blue morning not long after that, for the first time in Tom’s memory, Mother
is not at the stove when he enters the kitchen. He finds her upstairs sitting on
her bed, fully dressed in her coat and shoes and with her rosary clutched to her
chest. The room is spotless, the house wadded with silence.
100