We went through the cabinets, found a box of macaroni-and-cheese mix, bright orange and gooey. Later, it made my stomach turn.
“I’m hungry,” Henry said after the neon glop was gone.
“Would you like me to make you something?” baby June said, dragging her Easy-Bake out of the kitchen closet.
“Oh, I wanna cake baked by a lightbulb,” Henry said. “That sounds wonderful, a gourmet treat.”
“You do?” She lit up like she was the electricity that would power the bulb. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she said, patting the oven. “What kind do you want? Yellow or black?”
“It’s yellow or chocolate,” I said.
Baby June shrugged. She didn’t care. She baked us each a cake and then delivered them as though waiting on us was the greatest thing in the world. We thought she was nuts.
“You want a real toy?” Henry asked her. Baby June nodded. He went deep into his closet and pulled out an old toy machine gun. “It still works,” he said.
Baby June took the gun, raised the barrel to her eye, looked inside, and simultaneously pulled the trigger, shooting herself in the face, no joke.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “It doesn’t do anything except make noise.”
“It kills people,” Henry said.
“Oh.”
Mrs. arrived home hours later, white as rice. She locked the sliding glass door, the front door, and turned out the lights while Henry, baby June, and I sat silenced by her strangeness in the sudden dark of their living room. We watched her go wordlessly up the stairs and heard the bedroom door shut.
“The hamburgers are still in the sink,” I said to Henry, who didn’t get it. “Your mother has never gone to bed leaving the kitchen dirty. She doesn’t do that. She always wipes a damp sponge across the counters, turns off the light over the stove, and wraps her dishrag through the refrigerator handle before going upstairs.”
“What are you?” Henry asked. “A pervert?”
I didn’t answer.
“Six burgers are drowned,” I said, emphasizing the sinking sensation of the word drowned.
Henry went up the stairs, stood outside the door of his parents’ room, and said in a loud, demanding voice, “When’s Dad coming home?”
“Sometime tomorrow” was the muffled answer.
The fact that she’d answered at all compelled Henry to push the questioning further.
“Are you getting a divorce?” he asked in a loud booming word-by-word voice you’d use to speak in the face of a tidal wave.
From the bottom of the steps, I saw Mrs. open the door in her robe.
“This isn’t about Daddy and me,” she said. “Your father had a problem with the car. He’s trying to straighten things out.”
“There are dishes in the sink—it’s gross.”
Mrs. adjusted her hair, pulled her robe tighter, put one fuzzy pink slipper in front of the other, and marched into the kitchen. She snapped on her rubber gloves, reached deep into the muck, pulled out the macaroni dishes, the frying pan, and, one by one, with the expression of a woman changing diapers, plucked hamburger after hamburger out of the water, held each up in the air for a few seconds to drain, and then dropped the remains into a trash can. She brushed her hair back with her elbow, shook Comet over everything, and went to work under hot water. The steam and Comet mixed to form a delicious noxious cloud-o’-cleanliness that drifted through the house. Whatever had happened hours earlier, the moment that caused dinner to drown, had been a kind of lapse, a seizure of sorts, but now with the green cellulose sponge in hand, everything was all right.
Mrs. Henry turned on the floodlight by the kitchen door, so I could see my way home. A three-foot path of white light cut through the darkness and lit up the grass green and bright.
There was a hill between the houses. A five-foot bump of dirt that changed things. The adults in either house didn’t know each other well; it was too much work. To say hello they had to go around the long way, out the front door, down the flagstone blocks to the sidewalk, up the next driveway, up the flagstone blocks to the three steps, to the front door, and ring the doorbell, ring, ring. Hi, just thought I’d stop over. It didn’t happen. If the land had been flat, if geography had been on their side, everything would have been easier. But the way it was, the Henrys were trapped. On the right edge of their property was a high homemade fence and on the left was this grass-covered tumor-o’-land that may as well have been Mount Baldy.
“Good night,” I said and ran up the mountain toward the house on top of the hill. Mrs. turned the floodlight out behind me.