Buddy shakes his head. She had no limits, he thinks. Nothing could stop her except for one thing. Time.
His mother sits across from him at the kitchen table. There’s snow outside the window, and soon his father will come home with pizza for dinner, and his brother and sister will rush in, their jeans soaked, faces red from the wind, after sledding with the big kids. But now, right now, he’s in the warm kitchen with his papers and crayons—and Mom. She is doing her own project, reading and rereading a stack of business papers with business numbers on them. She’s been crying, but now she’s stopped crying, because she sees he’s scared.
“Show me what you’re drawing,” his mother says.
He doesn’t want to. It’s sad. But she’s seen his other sad drawings, so he moves his arm and she leans forward. It’s a black rectangle surrounded by green except for a few scribbles of red and yellow. She says, “Are those flowers?”
“I’m not good at them,” he says.
“Oh, I think you are,” she says. “And I like that there will be flowers near me. It’s a really nice grave, Buddy.”
It’s been months since the TV show where everything went wrong. Mom talks about all his sad pictures like they’re no big deal. She hardly cries (at least in front of him). She looks through what he’s drawn today, and then says, “Why don’t you draw me something from when you’re, say, twelve years old?”
He tries to remember all the way to twelve. He’s sitting in a building. It’s summertime, the medal heavy and slick against his chest. He’s taken to secretly wearing it under his clothes, like Superman’s outfit. Frankie’s there in the building, looking tall and skinny and tough. One of his favorite Frankies. Buddy draws another rectangle and Mom says, “That’s not another grave, is it?”
He shakes his head. “It’s a pinball machine,” he says. “Frankie’s really good at pinball. Plays it all day.”
“Oh,” his mother says. “That’s nice.” She’s not crazy about the idea, he can tell, but she has no idea how good Frankie’s going to be. “And you’re there, too?”
“I just watch,” he says. He draws himself next to the pinball machine, and draws a circle where the medal would be.
“Does Dad know about that?” she asks. “That you two are hanging out in a pinball parlor?”
He shrugs. He sees what he sees. He can’t read minds.
She takes one of the blank sheets of paper and starts writing on it.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I just wrote down, ‘When Frankie is sixteen, he gets really good at pinball.’ ”
“Oh.”
“I like to know what you’ll all be doing,” she says.
“After you’re dead,” he says.
“It’s like a future diary,” she says. “You draw, and I write down words, but it’s the same thing.”
“It doesn’t make you sad?”
She thinks about this. “Sometimes.” He likes that she doesn’t lie to him. “But other times, I’m just happy that you all grow up together, that you take care of one another.”
He doesn’t like to think about Mom not being there, in the future. But he’s known ever since The Mike Douglas Show that she’d be leaving them. Just like he knows that Irene is going to have a baby, and the baby’s going to be a teenager named Matthias, and someday he and Matthias will put brown tile on the front step.
Suddenly he’s dizzy. His body is little and big at the same time. His arm by the window is cold, but he can feel the sun on his back, feel the sweat running down his sides.
“Buddy?” Mom asks. “Buddy, look at me.” She comes over to his side of the table and crouches down. She turns his face in her hands. “Stay with me, kiddo.”
Yes. There she is. Mom’s here. Alive. Alive.
She runs a hand across his damp hair. “You’re sweating,” she says.
He pushes a palm against an eye. He nods.
“Tell me what this is, Buddy,” she says, and points to the drawing of himself.
“It’s a medal. I used to wear it all the time, then.”
“What medal is that?”
“The one you’re about to show me,” he says.
Her eyes go wide. Talking about her death didn’t make her cry, but this does. Then she smiles, a brilliant, uncontained smile, and says, “Oh, that medal.”
She leads him upstairs to her room, and opens a drawer. “This was given to me a while ago, but soon it will belong to you.” It’s wrapped in a scarf that she never wears because it’s too fancy, too colorful. Teddy’s taste, not hers. She peels back the cloth, and the gold is as bright as her smile.
“You have a wonderful gift,” Mom says. “I know it’s hard sometimes. I know you get worried. But I know you’ll always do the right thing, because you have a good and noble heart.” She waits until he looks her in the eye, and then she touches her forehead to his. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “It’s all going to work out.”
Irene pulls up with the windows down, and he can hear her singing along with the radio. Even after she turns off the car she keeps singing: “Ba-a-a-nd, on the run. Doot-do-do-do-doo.” Buddy loves to hear her. She sings all the time when she’s a girl of nine and ten, and hardly at all when she’s older. But in the early weeks of August 1995, right before the end, she turns into Maria von Trapp. She sings every time she takes a shower. She hums while she’s cooking dinner. And when she’s not saying anything at all, she seems to be swaying to music he can’t hear.
She sees the newly tiled front step, finished now except for the cleanup, and instead of yelling at him or asking him what the hell he’s wasting his time on, she just shakes her head. “Buddy, that’s indoor tile.”
Matty says, “So?”
“So it’s going to be slick as hell in the winter.”
“It’s not slippery,” Matty says. “Try it.”
“Wait till it rains,” she says.
“Just try it.”
Irene abandons her complaints. She steps up with mock seriousness, compliments Buddy and Matty on their handiwork, and goes inside, still humming Paul McCartney.
Matty’s looking at him. “It’s weird, right?” the boy says. “How good a mood she’s in.”
Buddy shrugs. It’s time to sponge up the dust and excess grout. And he has more work to do before sunset: mail to deliver, people to talk to, a meal to make. What is he forgetting? Not the cold. He remembers the winter. No, now: Dad driving home, asking what’s for supper. The color of his mother’s scarf. No. Matty leaving for the gas station to buy milk. And what else? Frankie showing up, looking for Matty. The feel of the medal in his small hand.
“Uncle Buddy?” Matty says. “You okay?”
Buddy holds on to that voice. Fourteen-year-old Matty. They’ve just finished tiling the front step.
“Did I make you mad?” Matty asks.
He shakes his head. “We need milk.”
“Milk?”
“For supper.” Buddy walks toward the house. “There’s money on the kitchen counter.”
“But—”
Buddy raises a hand. He’s already said more than he’s comfortable with. Words are dangerous. He goes upstairs, and stays there even after he’s done with his shower, so that he’s safely out of the way when Frankie barrels into the house, looking for Matty. But the boy is gone, so he instead declaims to Teddy in his too-loud voice that he’s selling the hell out of UltraLife products. Going through the numbers, talking about the percentages he’s making on each sale. He wouldn’t try that bullshit with Irene. But she’s out of the way, too. As usual, she’s in the basement, in front of the computer, online again.