Free Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell Page B

way.
    “Let’s just be thankful nobody was hurt,” she mumbled.
    Nal didn’t want his mom to relinquish her first fury. “How can you say that? They fired you, Mom! Now everything’s … off course.”
    His mom stroked a blue curl of Nal’s hair and gave him a tired smile. “Ooh, we’re off course, right. I forgot. And what course was that?”
    Nal picked up more shifts at the grocery store. He ran eggs and pork tenderloins down the register, the scanner catching his knuckles in a web of red light. Time felt heavy inside Penny’s.
Beep!
he whimpered along with the machine, swiping a tin of tomatoes.
Beep!
Sometimes he could still feel the progress of his lost future inside him, the summer at Lake Marion piping like a vacant bubble through his blood.
    “Mom, can I still go away to college, though?” he asked her one Sunday, when they were sitting in the aquarium light of the TV. He’d felt the bubble swell to an unbearable pressure in his lungs. “Sure,” she said, not looking over from the TV. Her eyes were like Samson’s, bright splashes of blue in an oak-stained face. “You can do whatever you want.”
    When the bubble in him would burst, Nal would try to starta fight. He shouted that what she called his “choices” about college and LMASS and Penny’s Grocery were her consequences, a domino run of misfortune. He told her that he wouldn’t be able to go to college if she didn’t find another job, that it was lying to pretend he could.
    “I heard you guys going at it,” Samson said later in the kitchen, clapping mayonnaise onto two slices of bread. “Give Mom a break, kid. I think she’s sick.”
    But Nal didn’t think that his mom had contracted any particular illness—he was terrified that she was more generally dying, or disintegrating, letting her white roots grow out and fusing her spine to their couch. She was still sitting in front of the TV with the shades drawn when he got off his shift at six thirty.
    Nal wrote a poem about how his mother had become the sea hum inside the conch shell of their living room. He thought it must be the best poem he’d ever written because he tried to recite it to his bathroom reflection and his throat shut, and his eyes stung so badly he could barely see his own face. She was sitting out there now, watching TV reruns and muttering under her breath. Samson was out drinking that night with Vanessa. Nal gave his mother the poem to read and found it under a dirty mug, accumulating rings, when he came back to check on her that Friday.
    Nal got a second job housesitting for his high school science teacher, Mr. McGowen, who was going to Lake Marion to teach an advanced chemistry course. Now Nal spent his nights in the shell of Mr. McGowen’s house. Each week Mr. McGowen sent him a check for fifty-six dollars, and his mom lived on this income plus the occasional contribution from Samson, wads of cash that Sam had almost certainly borrowed from someone else. “It helps,” she said, “it’s such a help,” and whenever she said this Nal felt his guts twist. Mr. McGowen’s two-room rental house was making slow progress down the cliffs; another hurricanewould finish it. The move there hadn’t mattered in any of the ways that Nal had hoped it would. Samson had buffaloed him into giving him a spare key, and now Nal would wake up to find his brother standing in the umbilical hallway between the two rooms at odd hours:
         SUNDAY : “How you living, Nal? Living easy? Easy living? You get paid yet this week? I need you to do me a solid, brotherman …” He was already peeling the bills out of Nal’s wallet.
         MONDAY : “Cable’s out. I want to watch the game tonight, so I’ll probably just crash here …”
         TUESDAY : “You’re out of toilet paper again. I fucking swear, I’m going to get a rash from coming over here! Some deadly fucking disease …”
         WEDNESDAY : “Shit, kid, you need to get to the store. Your fridge is