“PEOPLE MOVED in?” Mom asked me when she got home.
“Yeah. The Bennetts.”
“You met them?” She sounded surprised. She knew I didn’t talk to people if I could get away with it.
“Yeah.”
She waited. “Well?”
I looked up from my history book. Finals were next week and I had tests I wasn’t ready for. “Well?”
She rolled her eyes. “Are they nice?”
“I think so. They have….” I thought on what they had.
“What?”
“Kids. One’s my age. The others are younger.”
“What’s that smile for?”
“A tornado,” I said without meaning to.
She kissed my hair. “And here I thought you being older would mean you’d make more sense. Happy birthday, Ox.”
We ate dinner that night. Meatloaf. My favorite, just for me. We laughed together. It was something we hadn’t done in a while.
She gave me a present wrapped in Sunday comics from the newspaper. A 1940 Buick shop manual, old and worn. The cover was orange. It was musty and wonderful. She said she saw it at Goodwill and thought of me.
There were some new pants for work. My others were starting to fall apart.
There was a card too. A wolf on the front, howling at the moon. Inside, a joke. What do you call a lost wolf? A where-wolf! Underneath she’d written seven words: This year will be better. Love, Mom. She drew hearts around the word love, little wispy things that I thought could float away if they but caught on my breath.
We washed the dishes as her old radio played from the open window above the sink. She sang along quietly as she splashed me with water, and I wondered why I smelled like candy canes and pinecones. Of awesome and epic.
There was a soap bubble on her nose.
She said I had one on my ear.
I took her by the hand and spun her in a circle as the music picked up. Her eyes were bright and she said, “You’re going to make someone very happy someday. And I can’t wait to see it happen.”
I went to bed and saw the lights on in the house at the end of the lane through my window. I wondered about them. The Bennetts.
Someone, my mother had said. Make someone very happy.
Not a her. But someone.
I closed my eyes and slept. I dreamt of tornadoes.
wolf of stone/dinah shore
RICO SAID, “Looking good, papi,” when I came to work the next day. “What’s got you going with that spring in your step?”
It was Sunday, the Lord’s Day as I was taught, but I figured the Lord was okay with me coming to this house of worship instead of one of his. I’d learned my faith at Gordo’s.
“Must be some pretty girl,” Tanner called from where he was bent over some ridiculous SUV that could be turned on by the sound of your voice. “He’s a real man, now. You get some sixteen-year-old strange last night?”
I was used to the crude. They meant no harm. That didn’t stop me from flushing furiously. “No,” I said. “No, it’s not like that.”