Free Reality Check (2010) by Peter Abrahams Page B

Valley cemetery wasn't very big, and soon he was standing before it: a small dark stone, rounded at the top and glinting with mica or some other mineral. It had her name, Gina Laredo, and her dates, much too close together for bracketing a human life.
    You were supposed to bring flowers: Cody knew that from the movies. He looked around for something pretty, but nothing qualified. He bent down, swept away a few scraps of paper and some dead leaves. His mom had kept the reality of things hidden from him. All that--what was the word? Trauma. All that trauma: the discovery, very late, of an aggressive form of breast cancer; mastectomy; chemo or radiation or maybe both--Cody still wasn't sure. What the hell difference does it make now? his father had said the one time he'd asked. But whatever the treatment, she'd lost her hair, and that couldn't be hidden, although she'd tried. He'd lain beside her on her bed--this was before the apartment, in their house, a nice little house with a park across the street--and she'd told him she'd been sick but was all better now, and her hair would soon grow back. And her hair did grow back--but different, with gray in it--and she'd returned to her job in a lawyer's office. Then one day, carrying groceries up the front steps, she'd tripped and fallen. Cody, beside her, heard a cracking sound, and his mother had cried out in pain. "Mom! Mom! Are you okay?" He'd helped her up and she'd limped into the house, partly supported by Cody's shoulder. The cracking sound had come from her leg breaking, not one of the two smaller bones below the knee, but the big one from the knee to the hip, which doesn't break often. His mother's bones had turned out to be full of cancer. It hadn't been long after that. That bone crack: Cody remembered it more clearly than her face.
    Light faded. Her name and dates grew invisible. Cody had an idea. He went back to the car, opened the trunk, took out an old practice football he kept in there just in case an opportunity for throwing it around came up. In the glove box he found a Sharpie. He wrote on the ball: RIP MOM . LOVE CODY , 11. Football players always followed their name with their uniform number. He went back to the gravestone and laid the ball in front of it.
    Cody drove out of Indian Valley, got back on the interstate. The way his father was now: How much came from his mother dying, both the fact of it and the how of it? Some, for sure, but hadn't there always been too much drinking? Cody thought so. And what about the meanness? Cody wasn't so sure about that. Who'd first taught him football, shown him how to throw and catch? His father, of course. He owed him for that. Maybe his father had knocked him around some in those sessions, but hadn't that been to toughen him up? You had to be tough, and not just in football.
    The stars came out, so many and so beautiful in the black sky, but not much company. Cody tried to find something on the radio. He drove through the night. The road went on and on, lit-up sights flashing by but mostly just the darkness. For the first time in his life he felt American. He'd been American the whole time, of course, just had never translated it into a feeling. Did all Americans share the feeling, have it the same? Cody didn't know. At some point during the night, he realized he'd forgotten his boots.
    And maybe he was going to need them. Snow was falling the next day when he reached Chicago. He hadn't slept and his eyes were getting heavy, but Chicago didn't look like a good place for sleeping. He kept a lookout for Soldier Field but didn't spot it.
    Halfway across Indiana, or maybe a little more than that, traffic, so heavy since Chicago, finally thinned out. A sign rising high over the flat land read: MOTEL . Cody took the next exit. He'd stayed at motels before--with his parents on the San Diego trip, and several times on the road for Pop Warner tournaments--but he'd never handled the signing in before. It turned out to be easy,