There was no help for it...

Another Country -5-
Erin Halfelven

I came at our house the back way through the alley, but Mom was there, chopping at some weeds with a long-handled hoe. The back gate made of pigwire stood wide open. At least I didn’t have to get off my bike to open it.

“Bobby,” she said as I rolled past her. “Grab the garden rake and help me here.”

“Sure, Mom,” I agreed. “Lemme lock the bike up first.” I rolled to the clothesline umbrella, which had a stout iron pole sunk in concrete that I wrapped my bike chain around before clicking my lock. With the gate open, I wanted my bike secure in case we went into the house.

I retrieved the heavy garden rake from the passage between the house and the garage and joined Mom at the patch of weeds near the back gate. I offered her the rake and took the hoe when she accepted. “What are we doing? It’s springtime; the weeds will just come back in a couple of weeks, won’t they?”

Mom made an agreeable noise and pointed me to where I should start working. “Well, we don’t want them growing under the trailer,” she said.

“Trailer?” I began chopping at the nasty, nasty, goat’s head vines that lay flatly on the ground near the fence. The thorns on those things can go right through a bicycle tire or most shoes, and it’s almost impossible to get rid of the plants.

“For Cynthia, while she’s staying with us,” Mom amplified. “She’s not going to share a bedroom like you and John did when you were little.”

“I hadn’t thought about it, actually,” I admitted. “Huh? Well, it’ll keep her out from underfoot.”

Mom snorted and kept using the rake to pull weeds into a pile that would later be dumped into a barrel to be burned. She and Cynthia got along well enough, but it’s like the legendary Chinese symbol for trouble: two women under one roof. Best to avoid that. Mom used the middle bedroom since John moved out for knitting and crafts, and for an office for her bookkeeping business, letting Dad have the tiny den for his model car collection.

We worked quietly for a bit, and the effort kept my mind off why I had come home early from the park, which Mom hadn’t asked about, for which I was grateful.

With what Mom had done before I got home, we’d cleared a fair bit of the area before I had to ask something. “Where’s this trailer?”

“Oh,” Mom paused to pull some weeds loose from the tines of the rake. “John and your father are going to bring your Uncle David’s Spartan down from the mountains tomorrow. Will you go with them?”

I hesitated. It could be fun, but my current problem took up a lot of space in my head. I didn’t really want to involve my family yet. I needed to work some things out for myself. “I dunno,” I stalled. “Sounds like work,” making a joke of it.

“Well, if you stay here, Cindy will be coming over with her mom and a station wagon full of their stuff. John and Cindy’s. We’ll be sorting what goes into storage and what gets moved in here. Somewhere. And Antonia will be making dinner.” She rolled her eyes. Mom actually hates sharing her kitchen with anyone. Antonia was Cindy’s mom; she ran a restaurant out in one of the little towns on the coast, which kind of made it worse.

Going with Dad and John began to look better. I sighed.

Mom stopped working and stared at me. She made another statement, “You look like the wolves have caught your scent.”

That was kind of how it felt. Are all moms telepathic? I waited too long before answering, and Mom leaned her rake against the fence, pulled off her gloves and stuck them into the fence, too. “Let’s go inside, have some orangeade, and you can tell me all about it.”

I took a long breath, then tried to defuse things. “It’s…. I…no?”

“Yes,” she countered, pulling the hoe out of my hands and leaning it next to the rake.

She led the way to the backdoor of the house, and I meekly followed. Our house is painted a milky yellow with gray trim, with those overlapping horizontal boards called clapboard, I think. It’s a nice place, built back when the air base was new for offbase housing for service families.

Three bedrooms, 1-3/4 bath with another half bath in the detached garage. The extra bathrooms were added later, plus the den and the little breakfast nook that stuck out into the backyard, The backdoor opened into a laundry room, which had also been added. Unlike the rest of the house, the laundry room had a cement floor instead of oak.

It wouldn’t really be crowded to have an extra person living with us if Mom hadn’t turned John’s old room into an office and crafts room. She did bookkeeping for some local businesses, including Josh’s family, so having the office was handy. Then again, maybe Cindy wanted to have the illusion of her own place in a trailer out back.

My brain tried to seize on distractions to avoid thinking about the impending interrogation from Mom. I knew she wouldn’t give up prying until I told her everything. When Mom wasn’t looking at me, I squinched my eyes up tight and tried teleporting, but that trick never works.

We have fruit trees in the sideyard and Mom makes orangeade from our own oranges, lemons and grapefruit. I guess it’s citrusade but if I call it that, no one knows what I’m talking about. The oranges have more color, so they win the naming contest. She poured us a couple of glasses while I got a small plate that I loaded with the cheap vanilla creme sandwich cookies that aren’t so sweet and go really well with orangeade.

They were fresh out of the bag and the room filled with the scent of vanilla and citrus and I smiled in spite of my worry because of the lovely smell.

Mom smiled back, took a sip of her drink then moved in to eviscerate her youngest child, me. Mom would have made a good police detective.

“So you came home to avoid getting in a fight with someone,” she stated.

How does she do that? “Uh….”

She nibbled a cookie. “Josh….”

I shook my head.

“Someone else then. Not one of your teammates, so someone I don’t know.”

“G-gary,” I stammered. “Gary Swopes. He’s a senior at school. Sometimes plays with us in the park.”

“Tall kid with a sly look and a lot of sass,” she noted.

I nodded. So she did know him. Huh? I wondered how.

“You did something he didn’t like.”

I made a noise. “He blamed me for scaring him so that he pissed on his shoes.”

Mom blinked. That was unusual. Or maybe she was trying not to smile. “There’s more,” she prompted.

“Uh, I was hiding in the latrine, and he came in to pee, and when I came out of the stall, well, he didn’t know I was there, and he started to turn and, uh, peed on his own shoes.”

“Well,” said Mom. “You were hiding in the latrine.”

“Because, because…because of Chud!” I sort of squeaked that out; we were getting close to the things I didn’t want to tell her.

“Chuckie Fugate. He chased you into the latrine.”

“Not really,” I admitted. “But he gave me two purple nurples, and they really hurt.”

Mom closed her eyes but took another bite of cookie. “I bet,” she said. She opened her eyes and stared at me for a moment, chewing thoughtfully. I knew she wanted to know what purple nurples were, but if she didn’t ask, I wasn’t going to tell her.

She dislodged a crumb of cookie from the corner of her mouth and took a sip of her golden drink. Then she looked at me as if she were prepared to be disappointed. “Show me,” she said.

I swallowed a dry bit of cookie and took a sip of orangeade myself. She waited patiently. There was no help for it. It had been at least half an hour but…things still hurt. I stood up and lifted my shirt to show her the mounds on my chest.