Mama can’t see me, but I’m watching over her. From the kitchen. She’s on the couch in the den, recumbent, because she’s depressed, which she never says, but I know. I can read her mind.
She lays my ninth-grade personality assessment results back on the coffee table. They say I will probably become a chef, an actor, or a politician, that I’m certainly a genius, might be a sociopath. She needs to look that last word up, but the Websters is way across the room, and the Ingalls girls are running down their grassy hill, and she’s already wrapped in her butterfly quilt, still smoky from the brushfire I set when I was four. From the kitchen window, she saw me emerging from a wall of flames as if I’d just harrowed Hell. She smothered the fire closest to the house with all those polyester butterflies, scraps from old dresses charring, curling in the acrid air. She keeps the quilt to remind herself what I’m capable of. She tells the ladies at church that I’m dormant, like a seed—so small but so canny. They ask if I get enough to eat. She swears I’m destined for a higher purpose, but puberty comes late for the small. She fills the waiting with Michael Landen—what else should she do with the End of Days?
My stomach growls. Mama should be making supper, but she’s still recumbent—a green, brown, and gold chrysalis. I put a pot on the stove for spaghetti. Another pot for the sauce. I’ll make sweet tea.
And now someone’s gabbing at the front door, through the locked screen, which I can’t see from here, but it’s Fran from down the street. “Cheryl! You in there?” Fran’s the woman I work for on Saturdays washing poodles for a dollar a dog. Fran is concerned because a big fella was asking about the little fella in the back—which didn’t seem right at all: he didn’t even bring a dog. “Little House is on!” Mama shouts, leans up and stares at a storm brewing in Walnut Grove. Fran knows not to horn in on Little House. Mama pulls her butterflies tighter around her neck, a flake of charred gold polyester dangling from her chin, a tiny afternoon sun. Puberty—she’s thinking the word over and over. She keeps forgetting to look it up in the Colliers. I talk like a girl, so prissy and smart, big words she’s too tired to look up. Fruition’s taking forever, like maybe I’ll never be a man—like Charles Ingalls, so handsome, drenched in the pall and roar of the funnel cloud.
Fran rambles on and on, bursting-proud, shouting over the storm how she told the big fella “Rod is working. Rod can’t take visitors. Rod is fourteen!” Lord God Almighty, Mama thinks. “You told him alright, Fran! You told him! Now some pervert knows his name.”
The water on the stove trembles. You have to be patient, wait for the water to boil before you put the spaghetti in—from the center so it fans out like a wheel. That’s what Mama forgets to do: she forgets that supper’s our communion. Hers comes out all stuck in half-cooked clumps. Hard as bones.
When Fran gives up, the house settles—just the sounds of supper, the Ingalls, and Mama’s faint thoughts. The Ingalls are preparing to leave their devastated farm, to move back to Wisconsin. I can hear Mama snoring, dreaming of Charles, his tornado, and sociopath, sociopath, sociopath, as she curls inside her quilt to wait for the second coming of Christ.
