What He's Poised to Do

As befits a self-serious fourteen-year-old, I favored dignified, slightly artificial names: Luna Village, Tranquility Hills. Jill, twelve, wanted a name that made her laugh: “Moonesota,” she said, or “Moontana,” or “Moonte Carlo.” My mother and I indulged her names with weak smiles and encouraging nods. My father loved them. He was constantly asking Jill to think of new ones or, better yet, to make a list of all the ones she had thought of to date. One day he came home from work, and she rushed at him with open arms. “Daddy,” she said. “I thought of three more today: Vermoont! Green Cheese City! Moonesota!” She was beginning to repeat herself, but normally that would have made no difference to my father. Normally, he would have stood next to her and laughed at each and every joke. This was not a normal day, though. He went to the dining room table, set down his briefcase, sat down stiffly, and told my sister and I that he was leaving my mother for Catherine.

4.

This was followed by a long explanation in which he touched on several subjects that were unfamiliar to me and Jill. He spoke about what he called “carnal and conversational compatibility,” and did so in such a manner that it seemed he had not invented it, but rather had read about it somewhere. He warned us that when we picked a mate, we should be vigilant about ensuring that our moral compasses were oriented in the same direction. He even raised the issue of location: he had begun to feel strange since coming to the moon, he said, and worried that it was not natural to live there, no matter what the government said. When he was done with the speech, both Jill and I were thoroughly persuaded, and he sensed this. He nodded at us crisply, picked up his briefcase, and walked out of the kitchen. Jill and I rushed to the front window and watched him go through the gate in the fence. He closed it delicately and then he stood on the other side. He had one more short speech in him. “I put up this fence with my own hands,” he said. “I intended for it to keep you safe, to keep us all safe. It did a poor job because I did a poor job. It let Goosey out and now it is letting me out. I hope it does a better job for you.” He reached out to touch the gate, thought better of it, withdrew his hand. Then he turned and walked away. Jill began to cry. I kept staring out the window. Between the fence and the street, there were several hundred yards of empty frontage, which had two effects: first, to call into question the purpose of the fence; second, to allow me to watch my father recede slowly until he was no more than a tiny figure on the horizon of the evening. Then it was time for dinner, and I knew Catherine wouldn’t be coming, so I ordered some pizza.

5.

My mother was out all afternoon, covering for a friend at the hospital where she worked as a physician’s assistant, so she received confirmation of my father’s departure by telegram that evening. The pizza was a halfer: cheese for Jill, who had declared herself a vegetarian since the Goose in the Grass incident, and sausage for me. My mother took a slice from each half and nibbled at them cautiously. Normally she liked pizza, but even before the telegram arrived, she had suspected that the dinner was a bad sign. The doorbell rang. A man in a white hat and white gloves was standing there, and there was an envelope in his hand. In some ways, Alpha Settlement, still young, was unnecessarily formal. My mother read the telegram several times to herself, put it on her plate, and slid the sausage slice over it as a form of burial. “He used to send me letters all the time,” she said. And then she said no more. Had it been me, I would have closed my mouth if I had no more to say. But my mother did not close her mouth. In fact, she opened it wider, and then wider still. Jill and I, who had been staring down into the pizza, looked up at my mother’s gaping mouth. We didn’t know whether we were supposed to put something in there or take something out. Then my mother left the kitchen abruptly and went into her bedroom, where she stayed for one full month, occasionally emerging to shout at Jill or me, or drive to the liquor store, or watch old detective shows on TV. She loved to criticize the detectives when they missed obvious clues. “She’s wearing different shoes than she was before the murder,” she said. “Will you get a load of that?”

“He can’t hear you,” Jill said. “It’s a TV.” But my mother spoke with such volume that I wasn’t sure that Jill was right.

6.