Free The Monster Variations by Daniel Kraus

usual. James forced himself not to look at it. It upset his mother greatly, this scar; she masked it with more vigor and effort than Willie ever put into trying to hide his stump: cosmetics, lipstick, a raised glass of wine, a knuckle placed to make it look like she was thinking. How a tiny sliver of flesh could be so shameful was unfathomable to James, but it was a flaw, and that was something his mother was not skilled at handling.
    Mr. Wahl stood at the other end of the table, having been dragged in there by his wife to be present for this interrogation. But he had brought with him his work, those thousands of tiny numbers, and he stood above hispapers with both hands planted flat. There was paper and pens and a calculator, none of which were good signs.
    James opened the cereal but could not imagine eating. He had disobeyed his parents and they had caught him. His stomach churned and shook, and he needed to use the toilet. But he was not ready to give in, not quite yet.
    “I was rather surprised to receive the call,” continued his mother, “because of course I thought you two were over at Willie’s.”
    “Keep your eye on the donut,” his father said flatly, his eyes never leaving the numbers. He fished a pen from his ink-stained shirt pocket. “You screw up now, it’ll set you on the wrong path for high school, and that’s the launch pad for college. That’s all it is, kid, nothing more.”
    James sighed, taking care to make it sound authentic. “I know.”
    His mother arched an eyebrow as he busied himself with arranging the correct proportion of milk to cereal—without Louise around, it was easy to pour too much of both. His father continued computing his lists of numbers; James could see the mental mathematics tug at his eyes. This was nearly every weekend in the Wahl house: his father consumed with his work and his mother struggling to fill the domestic void left by Louise, who was off on weekends. James remembered when he was very little watching his mother try to hang laundry on a windyday. It was a chore she had not been required to do as a youth, and as a young wife it was something at which she had no facility. James remembered the brisk wind and how the snapping sheets fought his mother’s grasping hands, spinning and thickening until she stood defeated before the twisted, anguished cords. Shortly thereafter they hired Louise, a trained nurse who just happened to be an excellent cook and housekeeper.
    Weekends also meant no talking about the hit-and-run driver, Louise’s favorite topic. The ex-nurse was chatty by nature and happily oblivious to other people’s discomfort, and so during the week they often discussed over dinner the ongoing hunt for the killer. With Louise gone, it was verboten. James had the notion that his parents found the subject too vulgar for their table. Unless, of course, they were complaining about how much everyone else in town talked about it—that was fair game. James tried to understand. He knew that neither of his folks had living parents of their own; he had also formed the impression that before he was born there had been other babies who had died while still inside his mother. He was all they had, James knew it. There was no one else left to make them proud.
    “So you feel like telling me where you were?” his mother asked.
    James sighed again. He and Reggie had come up with an excuse on the way home and now was the time to try it. “Willie and me—”
    “Willie and I,” his mother corrected.
    “Willie and I ended up staying at Reggie’s,” he said, doing his best to appear sincere. His mother raised her eyebrow higher. “Don’t worry,” he added, “we were inside before curfew.”
    James glanced at his father and was surprised to see that his father’s eyes had stopped moving. In fact, his entire face and body had gone rigid. This was alarming—although his dad was deadly serious about focusing on the donut, he also took pleasure in James’s