“A lot of b-books, I know.”
Floor-to-ceiling shelves covered two walls, both of them overspilling with hardcover first editions and airport paperbacks, Norton anthologies and thin volumes of poetry. Even when Sean had still lived at home, the shelves hadn’t been able to contain Mom’s collection. Ten years later, there were rickety four-foot-tall piles leaning against every available surface. It looked more like a badly kept used bookstore than a living room.
“Was your mom, like, a hoarder?”
“I d-don’t th-think so. She didn’t k-keep everything. Juh-just books.”
Katie stepped into the room to get a closer look at one leaning tower of print, and he knew the moment she spotted the shrine, because she started to smile, but then the smile faltered and a crease appeared between her eyebrows.
Deepened.
She bit her lip.
Most families had a TV opposite the couch. Sean’s mom had pictures of him. Newspaper clippings. Report cards. Diplomas. The shrine was an ever-growing, never-changing record of his accomplishments, each carefully matted in acid-free stock, framed in walnut, and preserved on the living room wall.
Mike had named it. He thought the shrine was hilarious. If Katie’s first reaction was any indication, she shared Sean’s opinion that it was downright strange.
“Your mom was really proud of you,” she said after a while, running her finger across the dusty top of his framed kindergarten graduation photo.
Sean sighed. If he had a dollar for every time someone had told him how proud his mother was, he wouldn’t need to figure out a way to bail out Anderson Owens. He’d have enough ready cash to pay off the loans himself.
He never knew how to explain to people that in spite of every sign to the contrary, she hadn’t been proud of him. Not him. She’d been proud of anything he managed to accomplish, but only to the extent that it reflected her own glory. Every certificate and newspaper clipping on the wall was her way of saying, Look what an exceptional mother I am.
“You were a cute kid,” she said, poking the nose of five-year-old Sean. “But for heaven’s sake, you weren’t this cute.” She gestured at the wall. “I mean, with all due respect, did the woman have no sense of perspective whatsoever?”
He shook his head. She hadn’t.
As a teenager, he’d thought it was his father’s leaving that had broken her. Unmarried and unwanted, she’d been abandoned with an infant, and rather than process her pain and disappointment, she’d bent it into love and an almost grotesque desire for Sean to succeed.
He’d thought he needed to try harder. That she was brilliant and sensitive and special, and if he figured out how to give her exactly what she needed, she would love him.
It hadn’t worked. He understood now that there had never been any possibility of its working.
Looking at the shrine made his stomach ache with the memory of how heavy her expectations had felt when he was ten, eleven, twelve years old. The way she’d checked out biographies of great scientists from the library, quizzing him after he read them. The way she’d tell any stranger who expressed the smallest spark of interest that Sean had a 4.0 in school, and he was in the gifted and talented track, but really the teachers just weren’t smart enough to keep him on his toes.
Thank goodness he has me, she would say with a laugh. He’d never reach his full potential on his own.
The memories sat on his shoulders, and the claws bit in so deep that he sank to the floor in the doorway, dropping Katie’s jeans in a damp pile beside him.
“I had her for English, you know,” Katie said, walking farther into the room to look at his middle-school science fair ribbons. “She talked about you sometimes in class. Some of the kids would get her to do it on purpose, you know, to keep from having to do any work? Because you were the one subject it was easy to distract her with. And I would think, ‘How could she possibly be this clueless? She teaches high school. She has to know she’s making her kid’s life hell. How can she not know?’ ”
She turned and gave him a look full of sympathy. “Didn’t she know?”
“I d-d-d-don’t think sso. Sh-she wuh-wasn’t completely … well.”
Backing away from the wall, Katie examined the shrine again from a distance. “How did she get everything to line up like that? It must have been really hard.”
“Yeah.” He turned his face away, unwilling to look at it any longer.
“You hate it.”
He nodded.
“Why don’t you pack it up? Get it out of your sight?”
Rubbing his temples with his thumb and forefingers, he tried to formulate a response to that question. Nothing clever or funny occurred to him. His shoulders burned, and his throat felt swollen and stuck, a gate with rusted hinges that he had to shove the words past. “I t-t-tried.” He pointed toward the far corner of the room, where a box sat empty. “I g-g-got out a b-b-box, and I c-c-c-came in here, b-b-b-but I c-c-couldn’t sssseem t-t-to d-d-d—”
Sean slammed the back of his head into the doorjamb hard enough that he saw white spears at the edges of his vision. “Fuck!”