Free Love & Darts (9781937316075) by Nath Jones

for show, the other pounds the bottom of the tub.
    But. Though no one expects it, one more
oyster, one lodged in the crimp somehow, comes free and drops
straight down onto the others.
    One of the men says, “That’s about twice
what we had last year.” Satisfied, the men retreat. The tub
disappears, gets rinsed, gets forgotten again on the rafters in the
garage.
    The women do not hesitate to return. They
talk and laugh. Their hands are deft as they wield flexible
knives.
    Mrs. Swindan’s nine-year-old son announces,
“I want to do one.” The young man marries once. And his bride is
Impossibility. He conquers her in time. “Let me. Let me try.”
    His mother hands over her knife. “Find a
good one.”
    The boy takes the biggest oyster he
sees.
    His mother hands over the glove.
    “I don’t want to wear that.”
    “You have to protect your hands. It won’t
let you cut your fingers off.”
    The boy reluctantly puts on the wire mesh
glove. He holds the oyster level to the ground knowing that the
juice will run out if he does not. “Now what?”
    “See how it’s thicker down here? That’s the
cup. Across from that there is a sort of hinge. You want to stick
the knife right into the hinge. A twist should pop it open and then
you cut the bottle muscle.”
    “I thought it was really hard.”
    She smiles, knowing. “It is.”
    The boy, concentrating, holds the oyster
with the awkward glove. He finds the hinge and struggles to get the
knife tip in. The knife slips and rams into his palm but is stopped
by the steel mesh of the glove. His eyes are wide.
    “See; we could be on our way to the
emergency room right now.”
    Understanding more, he tries again. He can
feel it now. That place where the tip of the knife must penetrate.
“I get it.” He doesn’t falter. The flat tip goes in. He holds the
cup firmly but level in the glove and twists his knife hand enough
to pop the shell open.
    “Now get it loose underneath.”
    He cuts hesitantly. He doesn’t want to lose
the juice. He quits, offers up both the knife and the oyster. “I
can’t. You do it.”
    “Just keep going slowly. You’ll get it.”
    He does not want to try. He does not want to
be told to keep going. He does not want to do it wrong. He does not
want to not know how. He keeps looking around, at his mother, at
his father, at his aunts, at his dog, at the new wife of one of his
older cousins, at his brother, who nods. The pressure of the knife
is a little much and the oyster pops back, juice splashing down his
wrist, lost. But the muscle was cut and he holds the oyster up so
his mother will give it a squirt of lemon juice and a little
Tabasco. He knows this part and sucks it down, relishing his
work.
    She is satisfied and grants permission for
him to be dismissed. He hands back the glove and watches his mother
and aunt wield their knives, their experience. They shuck ten to
his one oyster and he wonders how it’s possible. They shuck them
and lay them out on the rock salt without losing a drop of the
juice. Even with three-year-olds running past them and tugging at
them and screaming at the top of their lungs and crying and
fighting over slobbery dog toys. His mother and his aunt don’t lose
a drop of juice. He is amazed by his mother, but doesn’t say so,
never will again. And he will forget this moment the instant he
leaves the room. Only somewhere—at a funeral, in a boardroom, on a
mountaintop—sometime later will the image come back to him and he
will be watching again, seeing his mother at the sink shucking
oysters.
    The oysters marinate for twenty minutes.
    But no one waits.
    Mrs. Roth goes out to the yard, kicks the
soccer ball one time, runs after it, hard, fast, then says nothing
but picks up the black-and-white ball and turns back. The children
follow her across the lawn, leaping, jumping, trying to grab the
ball back before she gets into the house, into the bathroom, where
they swarm around her holding their cupped hands up, waiting