“It’s okay, Harvey,” she said, but when he asked her to explain what he’d heard about a woman’s head that was found in a freezer and those children murdered by their daddy and left in the river, his mother took in a great big breath like the Big Bad Wolf and then put her head down. “Jason didn’t tell me that,” he said and that was true. He heard those stories at school. One kid saw it on the news and another has an uncle who is a fireman and went there to help those children. Kids listen to stories like that so Harvey told everyone at school what Jason told him, about a boy in a long black coat killing kids at school, and then the teacher said she needed Harvey’s help with something. She had over a thousand paper clips that needed to be divided up into colors and if he did all that quietly, he would get a page of stickers to take home, either Ninja Turtle ones or puppies. He took the Turtles. He can make a picture for his mom, because she likes things with shells, and he can put something in Klingon. Something good, like Cowabunga or Roses is red.

Lil

February 7, 2005
Newton

Today, Becca asked what I remember about that last night with my mother:

That night, my mother called out, “Good night, Lilliput,” and then she said something to my dad that left me puzzled. Had she known what was up ahead, she would have chosen her last words with great care, but of course, had she known, she wouldn’t have gone at all. A premonition would have kept her there with us and perhaps her last words to me, “Good night, Lilliput,” could have lingered there on my scalp, her warm breath in my hair. She would have curled there beside me. If she had been angry with my father, they would have resolved it and been sitting together at the kitchen table when I woke up.

It would have been so much easier if she had been diagnosed with something. We would have treated her illness like Gladys Fitzhue’s visit, when she came to town and wouldn’t leave. It was awful, but the visit pulled the three of us closer than we had ever been; they let me climb in their bed with them as we told the despicable things she had said and done that day, the way she insisted on cloth napkins and a china cup and extended her pinkie to bite into her toast but then chewed with her mouth open and also belched as loud as a man when she thought we couldn’t hear. She gossiped and even admitted she sometimes told people she liked their hair or clothes when she didn’t so she would look better.