Dark Places(8)

Patty suspected her son finally had a girlfriend, but her few hints in that direction made Ben so uncomfortable his pale skin turned blue-white and his amber freckles actually glowed, like a warning. She’d backed off completely. She wasn’t the kind of mother to jam open her kids’ lives too wide—it was hard enough for a fifteen-year-old boy to get privacy in a house full of women. He’d installed a padlock on his door after he’d returned home from school one day to find Michelle squirreling through his desk drawers. The lock installation, too, was presented as a done-deal: A hammer, some banging, and there it suddenly was. His own boy-nest, secured. Again, she couldn’t blame him. The farmhouse had gone girly in the years since Runner left. The curtains, the couches, even the candles were all apricot and lace. Little pink shoes and flowered undies and barrettes cluttered drawers and closets. Ben’s few small assertions—the curlicue phone cord and the metallic, manly lock—seemed understandable, actually.

She heard a shot of laughter coming from behind his door, and it unnerved her. Ben wasn’t a laugher, not even as a kid. At age eight he’d looked at one of his sisters coolly and announced, “Michelle has a case of the giggles,” as if it was something to be fixed. Patty described him as stoic, but his self-containment went beyond that. His dad certainly didn’t know what to do with him, alternating between roughhousing (Ben stiff and unresponsive as Runner crocodile-rolled him on the floor) and recrimination (Runner complaining loudly that the kid was no fun, weird, girlish). Patty hadn’t fared much better. She’d recently bought a book about mothering a teenage boy, which she’d hidden under her bed like pornography. The author said to be brave, ask questions, demand answers from your child, but Patty couldn’t. Much more than a graze of a question pissed Ben off these days, triggered that unbearably loud silence from him. The more she tried to figure him out, the more he hid. In his room. Talking to people she didn’t know.

Her three daughters were already awake too, had been for hours. A farm, even their pathetic, overleveraged, undervalued one, demanded early rising, and the routine stuck through the winter. They were now fluffing around in the snow. She’d shooed them out like a pack of puppies so they wouldn’t wake up Ben, then got annoyed when she heard his voice on the phone, realized he was already up. She knew that was the reason she was fixing pancakes, the girls’ favorite. Even the score. Ben and the girls were always accusing her of taking sides—Ben forever being asked to have patience with the small, ribboned creatures, the girls forever being begged to hush now, don’t bother your brother. Michelle, at ten, was the oldest daughter, Debby was nine, and Libby seven. (“Jesus, Mom, it’s like you dropped a litter,” she could hear Ben admonish.) She peeked out a filmy curtain to view the girls in their natural animal state: Michelle and Debby, boss and assistant, constructing a snow fort from plans they hadn’t bothered to share with Libby; Libby trying to nose into the side of the action, offering snowballs and rocks and a long, waggly stick, each rejected with barely a glance. Finally Libby bent at the legs for a good scream, then kicked the whole thing down. Patty turned away—fists and tears were next, and she wasn’t in the mood.

Ben’s door creaked open, and his heavy thumps at the end of the hall told her he was wearing those big black boots she hated. Don’t even look at them, she told herself. She said the same thing whenever he wore his camo pants. (“Dad wore camo pants,” he sulked when she’d complained. “Hunting, he wore them hunting,” she’d corrected.) She missed the kid who used to demand unflashy clothes, who wore only jeans and plaid button-downs. The boy with dark red curls and an obsession with airplanes. Here he came now, in black denim jacket, black jeans, and a thermal hat pulled down low. He mumbled something and aimed for the door.

“Not before breakfast,” she called. He checked, turned only his profile to her.

“I gotta get a few things done.”

“That’s fine, have some breakfast with us.”

“I hate pancakes. You know that.” Dammit.

“I’ll make you something else. Sit.” He wouldn’t defy a direct order, would he? They stared each other down, Patty about to give in, when Ben sighed pointedly, then slumped onto a chair. He started fiddling with the salt shaker, pouring the granules on the table and plowing them into a pile. She almost told him not to do it, but stopped. It was enough for now that he was at the table.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked, pouring him some orange juice she knew he’d leave untouched to spite her.