Free Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux Page B

through the side window of the store, I saw him standing near the cash register, in the shoe department, smiling at the front door as though to welcome a customer.
    The following year there was talk of a minstrel show, but nothing happened. We had a TV set then, and the news was of trouble in Little Rock, Arkansas, integrating the schools, black children protected by National Guardsmen, white crowds shouting abuse at the frightened black students who were being liberated. The bald-headed president made a speech on TV. Dad watched with us, saying nothing, maybe thinking how Mr. Bones had been liberated too, or banished. It was not what he had expected. The expression on his face was vacant, stunned with sorrow, but before long Dad was smiling.

Our Raccoon Year
    T HEY WERE LIKE hissing animals, blinded by the dark, thinking that no one knew. So we pretended we didn’t and hoped they’d stop. Then he’d say something, and she’d say something, and—Don’t say anything more, I thought, and held my breath—he’d say something sharp, and after a gasp and some crackling, their talk swished back and forth in furious whispers. Sometimes a thump, and a swelling silence that terrified Sam and me more than the hisses.
    It was not a question of our being happy or sad, but a condition, worry without a payoff, as though the house was always the wrong temperature. Then one muddy March day Ma said she was going away, she didn’t say where. She looked at us with bright anxious eyes and swallowed whatever she was about to tell us. Soon she was gone, down the driveway, where someone was waiting, under the sky like a low ceiling.
    â€œShe’s where she wants to be,” Pa said. “With her friend.”
    I did not know it at the time, but that was when our raccoon year started, the first feature of it, Pa stopping whatever he was doing to squint, and wrinkle his nose, with a listening tilt to his head.
    â€œThere’s this funny smell.”
    He had been an attorney. “My partner Hoyt used to say, ‘I bite people on the neck for a living.’” He smiled. “That wasn’t me.” He had been the first man in our state to gain full custody of his children in a divorce settlement, his best-known case. It happens these days, but years ago it was unheard of, the divorced husband holding on to the house and the children. I was one of the children, my younger brother Sam the other child, both of us still at the Harry Wayne Wing Elementary School in town. Pa was now a financial counselor, working from home, handling investments.
    â€œI’m a bottom feeder in the money business,” Pa said. “Just pawing through it like a scavenger.” But he was more than that: a reasonable cook, sometimes painted pictures, kept a boat on the creek in the summer. He gave us his wind-up Victrola and his collection of old 78 rpm records, which we often played—“South American Joe,” “One Meat Ball,” “Shanghai Lil,” Hawaiian tunes.
    After Ma left, he would not hire a babysitter for Sam, or a cook for us, or a cleaner for the house. He waited with us for the school bus on the main road, and then—as he explained in the evening—he cleaned the house, did the laundry, and went grocery shopping. His office was at home, so he could easily combine housework with his business. He stopped sketching and sailing. He took up fancy cooking, the sort of cooking that makes a person bossy, using recipes out of books, talking about his sauces and his fresh ingredients. He used expressions like “my kitchen” and “my garlic press,” and of some dishes, he said, “Those beef tips pair nicely with a Merlot,” or “Anything with a mouth would eat that.”
    But there was nothing he could do to fill the empty space that Ma had made by leaving. Watching him trying so hard made me sad. And so I ate the food he prepared with frowning