I was staring out at the short café window that opened up over the sink in the kitchen instead of paying attention to what my dad was reading in the news section about the seminaries who were making a difference in t="on">t="on">Cape town, t="on">South Africa. My mother was slowly spooning up small piles of corn watching me. If she noticed anything different about me she hadn’t said anything and so I scooped up more peas from the side of my plate and didn’t think anything of it. Kathy was sitting next to me keeping up with what dad was saying and nodding her head demonstratively. It seemed like her pony tail got higher and higher on her head each time we sat down at the dinner table to eat and I could guess that it made her more certain, to feel that there was something bouncy and friendly at the top of her head. I took a bite out of my bread and butter watching Dobson ignore my dad and the paper for the football game that was on loud from the other room in the living area. I heard a car pull in across the street and looked in time to see J’s truck pull into his driveway through the clear partition in the separation between the curtains covering our bay window. I stopped and stared. He got out and slung a back pack over his left shoulder and then walked into the garage disappearing from it to go inside his house somewhere. My mother was watching me and biting from her half corn of cob this time and I stared back and smiled but not because I was being friendly, but because I was in love. I picked up my dish and I brought it into the kitchen where I could rinse it under the sink and get a better look of watching J traverse up his hallway in the foyer, the part you could see through their front picture window, upstairs to his bedroom but of course I couldn’t see anything or any of it at all, so I stared looking for his mother maybe playing the game I couldn’t identify but that I’d seen her play before on her coffee table. My mother came in and I hurried to avoid her by washing my dish really fast and scooping everything with my hands into the disposal, turning it on so that we wouldn’t have to make conversation. I said, “It was good. Thanks.” And I left to go back into the dining room to clean up what empty plates were left including Kathy’s and Dobson’s, who was now entranced in the TV too much to notice that his plate was gone, and then with some trepidation I hefted up my father’s as well. I came back into the kitchen and stacked them side by side just like my mother wanted me to do with them in front of the chicken and red hen backsplash that was behind the counters and under the yellow country cupboards. I said to my mother that I had a lot of homework to do and that I needed to get started doing it and she looked over at me moving the plates slower than usual and mumbled under her breath “Okay.” I felt bad for her right then because I knew that she knew something was different about me just by the way I’d been going about and hiding things or by the strong feelings that I was having about J and about the way I was listening less than usual. I walked to my room, shut my door and layed on my floor with my books out in front of me trying real hard to concentrate on my Algebra II homework. |
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