No I I said, not cancer at all.
What does he have? She edged toward the door. Outside, her classmates had stopped running and were laughing about something.
I don’t know, I told her. It doesn’t have a name.
She nodded before she bolted away. Oh yeah, she said. I think I’ve heard of that.
That evening, I called the boss to tell her what the science teacher was doing.
Oh I know, she said. Isn’t it interesting.
I walked to my bed. No, I said, knuckles rubbing splinters off the potted tree trunk. I find it entirely uninteresting, I said.
She cleared her throat. Anything else? she asked. How’s math going?
A whole lot of people died of scurvy, I said. Tomorrow morning when you drink your orange juice She wished me a good night, then hung up. I knocked so hard on the potted tree, I knocked it over.
Sunday marked my twentieth birthday, and my mother called me early in the morning, singing half the song before she got bored and cut herself off. Then she said: Okay you big 2o, let’s go out for breakfast for once. Like a family, she said. I pulled myself up in bed. We are a family, I told her groggily, wrapping the blankets closer around me. Her voice was solid in my ear. Well, like another family then, she said.
I took a shower with my eyes closed. I’d slept bad all weekend,
knocking forever before I could sleep, pushing every disease I could name into the wood: scurvy, croup, cholera, polio, mumps, scabies, bubonic plague, eye cancer-get away from my hand, get into the roots, get out of the blood like bad water.
As I dried off, I played the one message on my machine, which was from the art teacher, wishing me a good one; she was the kind who noted birthdays down in her little book with the vigor of someone who has often been forgotten. She made no reference to the firing and spitting episode on Friday. I put on a dress with dark grassy patterns on it, and at my parents’ house my mother held my hands out in hers and said I looked lovely. I blushed, her bashful suitor. My father was in a bad mood; he said, Happy birthday, but then muttered how earlier that morning, he’d gotten a sunburn from watering the grass, and his skin was prickly and hot.
We drove the six blocks over and parked. The coffee shop turned out to be packed because this was the Sunday of the annual fall marathon and lots of people were out and about. A troop of runners passed, leg muscles taut and curved in the back of the thigh, and a cheer went up from the sidewalk.
After ten minutes, the host called our name and we sat down.
The booth by the door was drafty. The booth in the back was dirty. The booth in the middle was right under the air conditioner. It’s cold, said my father. His face was small.
I wanted to go home and go away.
My mother was steady and firm. She liked to make these situations the best possible for my father so that he would come back for the next birthday. She waved down the waiter and had him turn down the air conditioner, although he himself was sweaty from work. She asked for hot tea. I drank my juice and thought of dead bodies on big ships, how one sip of this powdered mix from concentrate in its small bumpy diner glass might’ve straightened their spines, revived them in minutes, eyes blinking and new with miraculous C. We ordered and talked but the whole meal was spent checking on my father, who was shivering inside a mysterious chill that neither my mother nor I could feel. She tasted the tea for him, like a courtier testing the food of the king for poison, and she, zealous courtier, thought the lemon tasted funny. We sent it back. They brought a second pot of tea, with no lemon at all. My mother said this one was not very hot. I shrank in the booth, my dress a receding meadow.
More marathon people clapped by outside. The morning was dry and I knew just how the sweat felt on their skin, air crackling in the nostrils like popcorn. I hated being near running events with my father: he used to run; I used to run.
At the end of the meal, my father remembered he needed plant food for the backyard from the hardware store. I leapt at the chance;
my pancakes were done and I needed to get out of there.
My father pulled a twenty from his wallet. That’s a big help Mona, he said. Thanks. Get a good kind, he said. Ask Jones what works.
I hadn’t set foot in the hardware store in years.
My mother pulled a fifty from her wallet. For your birthday, she said. Buy yourself something good. Just promise me you won’t put it in the bank.
The bank is closed, I said.
All the better, said my mother. She turned to my father. Since when do you garden? she asked.
I’ll meet you at home, I said, standing, leaving them with their cooling tea and irritable waiter. Outside, the air was warm and the
streets bright with orange cones, but lucky for me, there was no sign of runners anywhere.
The sprinklers turned on in the park, shush. I was jittery from the breakfast, so as I walked down the block, I considered my new number 2o. XX. Twenty is a score. An icosahedron has twenty faces. The sum of some of its own factors: 1, 4, 5, lo. The wholeness of that zero, the brand-spanking- new two. Welcome to the next decade.
I passed the movie theater and the bank. I walked by the bookstore, the post office, the drugstore, the candy shop, all the way to the very end of the block, to the brick and glass building that housed the one and only hardware store in town.
When I pushed open the glass door, stomach jerking, and entered, the store was empty of customers. Which felt surprisingly right.
These minutes were mine.
The bells rang my entrance but everything else was quiet except for the rustle of a newspaper turning at the counter. Mr. Jones was perched on a stool at the cash register, wearing green, reading. He barely glanced up. I barely glanced at him. I saw the familiar lump underneath his shirt, but I didn’t feel like asking him what it was. Instead, I drifted down Aisle One. Here were screens, faucets, outlets, hinges-everything you forget isn’t just organically part of a house. I picked up a doorknob of blue glass and twisted it in the air. Open. I could hear Mr. Jones flutter his paper at the counter.
I had said something about his number necklaces for the first 6 time when I was nine. It’d been one of his months of lz, a very bad time, and for a while I’d just watched as he took out the trash with that wax: z around his neck, then trundled back inside his house, 0 head low
and silent. I petted his hedges with my hand, hoping to make him somehow feel better. I hadn’t seen him for a few days and was getting increasingly worried when one afternoon, as I was riding my bike around the block, Mr. Jones came outside with his car keys jingling, wearing an 18.
Hi Mr. Jones! I’d said, riding down the sidewalk toward him, eager.
Hey there Mona, he said.
I’m glad you’re feeling better, I said. Nine times better.
He stopped opening his car. I rode closer. His face looked soft and worn as cloth.
Why thank you, he said. That’s truly nice of you to notice, he said. That’s a nice thing to do, for a kid to notice that.
Well, I said. 18 is nine times higher than!. That’s a ton higher.
He winked at me. Still, he said. You’d be surprised at how many people never say a word.
He wished me a good day and then got in his car and drove off.
All afternoon I felt great, having noticed. I was a good not icer
So I noticed everything that dayl over noticed I told another neighbor walking around that I liked her new haircut and she hugged me. I told the little boy who played up the street that he had a bleeding arm and he said, What? and ran off, scared. It stopped when I told my dad he looked tired and my mom said that was rude and to go clean my room.
The following year was when my father dropped out of the active world, and it was that same year that my feelings changed for Mr.