Chapters (22)
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- Throttle
- Dark Carousel
- Wolverton Station
- By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
- Faun
- Late Returns
- All I Care About Is You
- Thumbprint
- The Devil on the Staircase
- Twittering from the Circus of the Dead
- Mums
- In the Tall Grass
- You Are Released
- Story Notes and Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Joe Hill
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Mums
1.
When Jack comes downstairs for breakfast, Bloom is on the landline, talking to someone in a confidential, urgent tone of voice. Jack pays his mother no mind and helps himself to a bowl of granola. Cereals containing refined sugars and preservatives are not allowed in the McCourt household—the preservatives in sugar cereals are known to cause both autism and homosexuality. He carries his breakfast into the sitting room to watch X-Men on TV. X-Men is liberal media brainwashing and also frowned upon, but Jack’s father is off to Wichita for a gun show, and his mother is less hung up about cartoons.
“Hey, kid,” his mother says when she emerges from the kitchen. “You want to meet your great-great-great?”
“Meemaw?”
“You know she’s going to turn a hundred this summer?”
“That isn’t true.”
“She’s so old she was born before TV.”
“No one was born before TV.”
“Before cars. Maybe before horses. All the people in my family descend from trees,” Bloom McCourt informs him. “You know how long a tree lives? There’s trees alive today that were old when George Washington was born. We’re descended from George Washington’s people, too. I forget the details. You don’t believe me she’s about to be a hundred?”
“No.”
“Want to ask her yourself?”
“Are we going to call her?”
His mother steps into the front hall. She opens the closet under the stairs and lifts out a drab and battered suitcase. Bloom sets it on the floor by her feet and gives him a pointed look.
“I was aiming to surprise you. You and I have never taken a trip together before. We’ll get the bus in Cordia and zip on over to Joplin. We can catch a Greyhound to Minnesota there.”
“What about Dad?”
“Your father knows all about Minnesota. You think anything can happen in this house without his know-about-it? Get dressed.”
“Do I have to pack?”
She tipped her head at the suitcase by her feet. “Already done. I packed for both of us. Come on, now. Put on your hurry-up shoes.”
Jack has never met any of his mother’s people, not his grandfather Magnus, not his grandmother Devoted, and not his great-great-great-meemaw, who supposedly once babysat Ernest Hemingway. They are all of them Pentecostals and live up in northwestern Minnesota, on Lake Superior.