Joyce Maynard - Labor Day: A Novel

IT WAS JUST THE TWO OF US, my mother and

WHERE WE LIVED THENTHE TOWN OF Holton Mills, New Hampshirewas

MY MOTHER WAS A GOOD DANCER. More than that. The

THEY WERE LOOKING FOR HIM all over town of course.

MY MOTHER DIDNT HAVE A REGULAR JOB, but she sold

THERE IS A THING THAT HAPPENS sometimes, where you wake

AFTER MR. JERVIS LEFT, I went back to the kitchen. I

THAT SUMMER, MY BODY HAD BEEN changing. The fact that

SATURDAY. WHAT WOKE ME WAS the sound of knocking on

I THOUGHT WED JUST LEAVE BARRY where he was, but

THEN MORNING CAMESUNDAY NOWand we had to deal with things

OVER BREAKFAST, FRANK HAD TOLD US about the farm where

MY MOTHER ASKED ME TO GO to the library for

YOU PROBABLY WONDER WHY YOU dont have a brother or

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE afternoon when my mother

THAT AFTERNOON, THE TEMPERATURE reached ninety-five. The air had a

MY FATHER AND MARJORIE HAD BOUGHT a minivan, where the

YOU WOULDNT HAVE THOUGHT IT COULD get any hotter, but

TUESDAY MORNING. SCHOOL WAS SUPPOSED to start the next day.

WEDNESDAY. THERE WAS NO COFFEE that morning. My mother had

THEY CHARGED HIM WITH KIDNAPPING my mother and me. This

EIGHTEEN YEARS PASSED. I WAS thirty-one years oldlosing my hair,

SEX IS A DRUG, ELEANOR HAD TOLD ME. When sex

I T WAS JUST THE TWO OF US , my mother and me, after my father left. He said I should count the new baby he had with his new wife, Marjorie, as part of my family too, plus Richard, Marjories son, who was six months younger than me though he was good at all the sports I messed up in. But our family was my mother, Adele, and me, period. I would have counted the hamster, Joe, before including that baby, Chloe.

Saturday nights when my father picked me up to take us all out to dinner at Friendlys, he was always wanting me to sit next to her in the backseat. Then hed pull a pack of baseball cards out of his pocket and lay them on the table in the booth, to split between Richard and me. I always gave mine to Richard. Why not? Baseball was a sore spot for me. When the phys ed teacher said, OK, Henry, you play with the blues, all the other guys on the blue team would groan.

For the most part, my mother never mentioned my father, or the woman he was married to now, or her son, or the baby, but once by mistake, when I left a picture out on the table that hed given me, of the five of usthe year before, when I went with them to Disneyshe had studied it for at least a minute. Stood there in the kitchen, holding the picture in her small, pale hand, her long graceful neck tilted a little to one side as if the image she was looking at contained some great and troubling mystery, though really it was just the five of us, scrunched together in the teacup ride.

I would think your father would be worried about the way that babys one eye doesnt match with the other, she said. It might be nothing more than a developmental delay, not retardation, but youd think theyd want to have that child tested. Does she seem slow to you, Henry?

Maybe a little.

I knew it, my mother said. That baby doesnt look anything like you either.

I knew my part, all right. I understood who my real family was. Her.

I T WAS UNUSUAL FOR MY MOTHER and me to go out the way we did that day. My mother didnt go places, generally. But I needed pants for school.

OK, she said. Pricemart, then. Like my growing a half inch that summer was something Id done just to give her a hard time. Not that she wasnt having one already.

The car had turned over the first time she turned the key in the ignition, which was surprising, considering a month might have gone by since the last time wed gone anywhere in it. She drove slowly, as usual, as if dense fog covered the road, or ice, but it was summerthe last days before school started, the Thursday before Labor Day weekendand the sun was shining.

It had been a long summer. Back when school first got out, I had hoped maybe wed go to the ocean over the long expanse of vacation aheadjust for the daybut my mother said the traffic was terrible on the highway and Id probably get sunburned, since I had his coloring, meaning my father.

All that June after school let out, and all that July, and now just having ended August, I kept wishing something different would happen, but it never did. Not just my father coming to take me to Friendlys and now and then bowling with Richard and Marjorie, and the baby, or the trip he took us on to the White Mountains to a basket-making factory, and a place Marjorie wanted to stop, where they made candles that smelled like cranberries or lemon or gingerbread.

Other than that, Id watched a lot of television that summer. My mother had taught me how to play solitaire, and when that got old, I tackled places in our house that nobody had cleaned in a long time, which was how Id earned the dollar fifty that was burning a hole in my pocket, for another puzzle book. These days even a kid as weird as I was would do his playing on a Game Boy or a PlayStation, but back then only certain families had Nintendo; we werent one of them.

I thought about girls all the time at this point, but there was nothing going on in my life where they were concerned besides thoughts.

I had just turned thirteen. I wanted to know about everything to do with women and their bodies, and what people did when they got togetherpeople of the opposite sexand what I needed to do so I could get a girlfriend sometime before I turned forty years old. I had many questions about sex, but it was clear my mother was not the person to discuss this with, though she herself brought it up on occasion. In the car, on the way to the store, for instance. Your body is changing, I guess, she said, gripping the wheel.

No comment.

My mother stared straight ahead, as if she was Luke Sky-walker, manning the controls of the X-wing jet. Headed to some other galaxy. The mall.

W HEN WE GOT TO THE STORE , my mother had gone with me to the boys section and wed picked out the pants. Also a pack of underwear.

I guess youll need shoes, too, she said, in that tone of voice she always had when we went places now, like this whole thing was a bad movie but since wed bought our tickets we had to stay till the end.

My old ones are still OK, I said. What I was thinking was, if I got shoes on this trip too, it might be a long time before we came here again, where, if I held off on the shoes, wed have to come back. Once school started Id need notebooks and pencils, and a protractor, and a calculator. Later, when I brought up the shoes, and she said, Why didnt you tell me when we were at the store last time?, I could point out the rest of the items on my list, and shed give in.

We finished with the clothes part. Id put the things I picked out in our cart and headed over to the section where they sold the magazines and paperbacks. I started flipping through an issue of Mad, though what I really wanted was to look at the Playboy s. They sealed those up in a plastic wrapper.

Now I could see my mother across the rows of merchandise, wheeling our cart through the aisles. Slowly, like a leaf in a slow-moving creek, just drifting. No telling what she might put in the cart, though later I would learn: one of those pillows you put on your bed so you can sit up at night reading. A hand-held battery-operated fanbut not the batteries. A ceramic animala hedgehog or something along those lineswith grooved sides where you scattered seeds that you kept moist until, after a while, they sprouted and the animal would be covered with leaves. Its like a pet, she said, only you dont have to worry about cleaning out the cage.