Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

90 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Donna Hemans
to tell him Mom left us alone for the night. We were not really alone.
We were in a family compound, yards away from other adults, one of
whom came to see after us. We were nearly adults ourselves. Brad was
seventeen nearing eighteen, and I was sixteen nearing seventeen.
Night came quickly but lasted a long time. I woke several times,
listening for the rooster’s crow. It was too dark to see my watch and too
much trouble to light a candle.
Shane’s mother offered us cornmeal porridge for breakfast and
we slurped it greedily, though at home we wouldn’t have touched it
at all. Dad was the one to make it, and his idea of sweet is several
degrees below that of the average person. Red promised to take us
to Mandeville. We weren’t there when Mom returned, and in the
morning when we saw her she told us nothing of Milk River Baths,
nothing about the pain she’d hoped to cure.
“Have you called your father?”
“No,” I said. “We were waiting for you to come back.”
“He must be worried. Call him.”
“If he was worried, he would have come.”
“You might be sixteen, but as long as you’re under my care you’ll
speak about your father with respect. You heard me?”
“Yes, Mom.” It wasn’t my father that I was mad at. But how could I
tell my mother she was retreating from her children instead of the one
who caused her pain?
Brad dialed. He talked first, briefly. I talked for just as long. Mom
took the phone, hurrying away from the kitchen to her room to complete
the call. When she returned she was not at all the independent woman
of yesterday. She was a mother again, offering to take us on our last full
day to Negril. She was still quiet. Respectfully silent, I thought.
Brad said Mom seemed guilty. We speculated at first that she must
have spent the night with a man. But Brad decided no. “It’s something
else,” he said but we didn’t have the energy to figure out what. I settled
with thoughts of another man. After all my father was never without his
girlfriends, and my mother could remain righteous for only so long.
We were packed and ready for the day’s outing. Brad was trampling
little plants whose leaves closed up when the plant was touched. He
bent to blow gently on the leaves, watching the slow closing with the
amazement of a little child. We were waiting for the driver who was
taking us. “How was Milk River?” I asked.
“Wonderful,” she said as if distracted. “The water there is just
perfect.”