Free Dive by Adele Griffin Page B

You can’t break that bond, no matter how long and far you stretch it. I’ve been good at not pressuring you to come out here. Very good, I’d say, since you’re mine by law. You don’t belong to Lyle. That’s why I want you to think hard when you reconsider living here with me, your own mother.”
    I budge in my seat and don’t answer, although I want to ask her how could I reconsider something I never considered in the first place? But that would sound too smartmouth.
    So instead I say, “Well, it was fun singing in the car and all.”
    Mom’s eyes go a little moist then, and her hand reaches out to close around my fingers. “Tell me. Have you forgotten Before?” she asks. “When it was you and me, or even with Dad? There are days I miss, when you were little, when Frank knew how to have fun. Don’t you remember all the fun we had, us three?”
    “I don’t go back that far,” I explain.
    Then the waiter struts over with Mom’s salad and my sweetbread, except for it’s not sweetbread at all, it’s some kind of meat mash with gravy splattered on top.
    “I didn’t ask for this,” I say to the waiter and Mom, whoever will listen.
    “Sweetbreads, sir,” says the waiter, and he nods his head at the mash. The way he says sir sounds like he’s making fun of me. Then Mom tells me the disgusting truth that sweetbreads are another name for baby calf brains.
    “Someone could have told me that when I ordered.” My voice isn’t so polite. Mom smiles away the waiter, then leans over the table candle, gritting her teeth so that her smile becomes a pretend of what it was. She looks like a jack-o’-lantern.
    “Is this how Lyle’s raising you? Lord, at least you could try the food that you ordered and that I’m paying for.”
    “There’s no way I’m eating baby cow brains. That’s obscene.”
    The restaurant smoke is tingling my eyes, and the waterfall words and prinking piano are drowning the thoughts in my head. I squeeze my eyes shut against the smoke sting.
    “You are unbelievable,” Mom says. “I take you to this beautiful restaurant and all you can do is sulk. You’re a real prince.”
    “It’s not my fault,” I say.
    “Oh, it’s mine, then? Are you blaming me? Go ahead and order something else, whatever you want. Double my bill. See if I care.”
    “I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything from you.” A few people are looking over. “In fact, here. You can take your stupid bracelet back, too.” I pull it off my wrist and toss it into her salad, where it lands like a giant onion ring.
    “Great, Ben. Congratulations. It only took you twenty minutes to ruin this evening for me.”
    And I know she means it, too, and so I decide I’ll ruin it all the way.
    I stand up from the table, push back my chair, throw my napkin over the brains, and tell her in as unrestricted a voice as I know that she better drive me back to the motel.
    Right. This. Second.

I TOLD MOM I DIDN’T go back that far, but I’m lying. I remember too much of my Before, same as you. You used to talk about your Before, always plunk in the middle of some wrong time, like during our first Thanksgiving together.
    Remember Before? you asked Lyle, just as him and Mom and you and me sat down at the dining room table. Remember Before, when my mom put horseradish in the mashed potatoes, how good that was? That was like the perfect way to have potatoes.
    Lyle answered something easy on everyone, a nice thing about your mom’s cooking and then something else about how a real Thanksgiving always should have mashed potatoes, and weren’t we lucky to serve some up now?
    The harm was done, though. I felt the ghost of your mom glooming in the shadow while we said grace and passed plates. You made me see into the Before room when it was just you, your mom, and Lyle. A perfect Thanksgiving.
    I didn’t have those rooms in my Before. Mom and Dad were eater-outers, all the time, even Thanksgiving, when one year they found a seafood