Free The Monster Variations by Daniel Kraus Page B

moved an inch.
    “You were at Reggie’s house last night,” he said. His voice was soft but direct.
    James moved his jaw around the cereal. “Yes.”
    “Reggie Fielder’s house,” his father said.
    The cereal crackled inside James’s mouth.
    “Last night,” his father said.
    His father knew he was lying. James sat there with half-chewed cereal bloating on top of his tongue, trying to figure out where his plan had gone wrong and waiting for the trouble to start.
    But his father said nothing. Instead, he lowered his head back at his numbers. After a moment he snatched up his pen and put it to paper. Ink moving too fast: it was the sound of a rattlesnake’s approach.
    When James dared chew again, the noise was deafening.
    * * *
    When Reggie got home, his mother was on her back on the sofa, her small white feet hanging over the end. A pillow rested on top of her face. She still wore her waitress uniform; Reggie saw the multicolored splatters of other people’s food. A cigarette was dying on a dinner plate on the floor.
    “Reg?” Her voice was muffled. This was how sheliked to sleep. Sometimes Reggie went for days without seeing her face.
    “What.”
    She yawned and weaseled her body deeper into the cushions.
    “There’s chicken-fried steak in the fridge.”
    Reggie looked longingly at the TV and the stereo. He wouldn’t be allowed to turn on either until his mom went back to work at eleven, a whole lifetime away. He tossed his backpack onto the grubby carpet—he barely even noticed the rustle of Mel Herman’s painting inside—and sat in the cushionless rocking chair. With his toe he shoved aside the clay ashtray he had made his mother in art class several years ago, and put his feet up on the busted heater that currently served as their coffee table. He stared at his mother’s body.
    “I was at James’s house last night, in case you were wondering.”
    She didn’t respond. Smoke hung in the air above her head like an empty comic book balloon.
    “Actually, I was at Willie’s,” he said. He waited to see if this change in story would get a reaction.
    Her toes curled, then straightened.
    “Poor kid,” she mumbled through the pillow. Reggie didn’t know if she was referring to him or Willie. Over the past few years, as she had taken more shifts and responsibility at work, her interest in Reggie’s life had seemed to drift away. She resumed a momentary interestfollowing Willie’s accident, and for a few weeks had talked about the hit-and-run driver incessantly, badgering Reggie with questions that he was only too happy to try to answer. Reggie even brought Willie by at the beginning of the summer so his mom could gasp and shriek and ask him an almost unending series of inappropriate questions. “What was it like waking up without an arm?” “Do you feel sometimes like it’s still there?” “How much does an arm weigh? I mean, how much weight did you lose after it came off?”
    It was embarrassing for Reggie, but Willie didn’t seem to mind. Then she was off to work, and had barely mentioned the hit-and-run driver since, though this could be because she heard it nonstop from diners at the restaurant. She might just be sick of it.
    Reggie stood up and moved to her side. He watched his mother’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall. She was smaller than almost any mother Reggie had ever seen, and younger, too. Reggie was born when his mother was only seventeen, which meant she wasn’t yet thirty. Reggie supposed she was pretty as moms go, which explained the attraction for James and Willie, but he wished she would eat more. She got skinnier and skinnier, which made no sense—she worked at a restaurant! Reggie figured if he worked there he’d be eating burgers and fries and chocolate malts all day long.
    Beneath the pillow, he could see the blond waves of her hair. She spent a lot of time in the mirror messing with it. She’d put junk in it and tie it up above her head.Then she’d let it back