My father tried to get me to follow baseball the whole time I was growing up, and I was never interested until the summer he went away. There was something about the games that was perfect for those nights, the lazy pace of long games, the commentators' voices hushed and reverent and excited at the same time. By the middle of July I could trade statistics with the guys in the employee lounge. They treated me like some kind of child prodigy just for knowing division standings in the National League. They'd come up front just to ask me what I thought of the game.
“The whole bullpen is pathetic! We'd have won it if that guy hadn't blown it in the bottom of the fifth. Dejun Enterprises, good morning.”
Then one morning in July I woke up in so much pain I couldn't breathe or speak. I just lay there in bed until my mother came to tell me I was late for work. She'd taken to wearing her housecoat most of the day and night, with anything she might ever need stuffed into its pockets: nail polish, a deck of cards, rubber bands, gardening tools. She was starting to look like some kind of crazy building superintendent.
“What's the matter with you, sailor?” she said, fishing a bottle of Tylenol out of her pocket and offering it to me. “Too much fun on the town last night?”
“Guh,” I said.
“Aggie, you know what? I think your whole face is swollen.”
“Guh.”
“Is that the only word you can say, or just some new kind of teenage slang?”
“Guh.”
She drove me to the emergency room, where they told us that my wisdom teeth were impacted, causing an infection in my mouth, and would have to be removed immediately. I was in no condition to argue.
“You're going to be fine, honey,” said my mom. “Here, drink some water.”
“Has it been tested?” I mumbled.
When I regained consciousness, I had four fewer teeth and no memory at all of their extraction. I didn't even know what day it was. I woke up in my own bed, with a bowl of red Jell-O sparkling on the bedside table. I was starving and dug right in.
“The princess awakes,” said my mother, striding into the room. She fluffed my pillows and stood back. She was wearing a suit and lipstick and looked like a million dollars. For a couple of seconds I wasn't even sure it was really her.
“Guh?” I said, not from pain but shock. Some Jell-O worked itself out of my mouth and dribbled down my chin.
“Not this again,” Mom said. “Is that all you can say after being unconscious for two days? Can't you find the will to add just a few more consonants?”
“You wook nice,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling the curtains open to let in the sun. I winced. “I've been filling in for you at work. You don't get sick days, you know. So when I told them you wouldn't be in for the rest of the week, they asked me to substitute. Or I offered. Whatever, we agreed.”
I leaned up on my elbows in bed. My head felt like a hot-air balloon, something large and heavy floating over the rest of my body. “No way,” I said.
“There's no need to be rude,” she said primly. “I am a substitute, you know.”
“Teacher.”
She shrugged. I hadn't seen her this alert in ages.
“Same difference. Look, I have to go, I'm late. There's more Jell-O in the fridge if you want it, and some soup.”
“You can't really be doing this,” I said.
She put her hands on her hips and said, “Oh, be quiet. You sound just like your father.”
I sat up and started struggling with the bedcovers. In my weakened state it was like wrestling a bunch of monkeys. My own mother stood there and laughed at me.
“Honey, come look at yourself,” she said. She led me by the hand to the bathroom mirror, and I gasped in horror. My face was about three feet wide.
“Now, you just relax today. Frank says to take it easy and get healthy, which is the most important thing.”
“Okay.” I was back under the covers before I remembered to ask who Frank was.
“I mean, Mr. Dejun,” she said. And that probably would've worried me had I not immediately lost consciousness again. When I woke up throughout the day, it was only to eat more Jell-O and leaf through the sports section my mother had left by the bed. The Dodgers were still having a lot of trouble in the bullpen, which was really depressing.
I was out for a week. After a couple of days I was well enough to get out of bed, but I didn't. My face was still swollen and I was afraid that by venturing outside I'd frighten young children and dogs. Karen and Lucy came by between waitressing shifts to keep me company. Lucy had some rum she'd gotten from the pirate restaurant, and she and Karen used it to make some alcoholic Jell-O. We sat around in my room eating it with our fingers. None of us was having the summer we'd thought we would.
“So where's your mom, anyway, Ag?”
“She's doing my job.”
“At Dejun Enterprises, good morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Your own mother replaced you in the workforce? Man,” said Karen, “that is just so typical of our generation. We have no control over anything.”
“Yeah, man, you're not a person, you're a statistic,” said Lucy.
“Thanks a lot, Peg Leg,” I said.
“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “Here, you can wear my eye patch if you want.”
“Cool,” I said, putting it on. Karen and Lucy burst out laughing. “Ahoy, mateys,” I told them from between my puffy lips.
After the swelling had mostly gone down, I went back to work and my mother stayed home, but nothing was quite the same at Dejun; it was just too weird that Mom and I had done the same job and everyone there had met her. The textile-testing guys came up front and said, “Hey, Ag, your mom's cool. And now we know how come you know so much about baseball.”
Now, this was unfair. Everything she knew about baseball she'd learned from me just that summer. “Actually, no,” I started to say, but then I had to answer the phone.
“Dejun Enterprises, good morning.” I was a little out of practice, and my mouth felt sore and dry. The hours dragged past until I went home and sank into the couch to watch the news. This was when I realized that disaster had struck yet again.
What happened was this: a truck carrying chemical material tested by Dejun Enterprises overturned on the interstate in Tijeras Canyon and spilled. Dejun had tested the stuff, inspected the storage containers, and declared it safe to transport, but environmentalists at the scene were saying it wasn't safe at all, and the truck should never have been allowed on the road. Police sealed off the entire area with a roadblock, causing massive delays. The road was contaminated, the soil was contaminated, everything was contaminated. I had never heard of the chemical and I didn't know what it looked like, but I pictured it as a fluorescent green ooze spreading like a living thing across the ground. The reporter, her stiff black hair barely flapping in the canyon wind, said there was some question whether Dejun had even looked at this material before issuing its report. Camera crews shot Mr. Dejun going into his house, saying “no comment,” over and over again, his scowl barely visible under a sport coat he draped over his head. “Allegedly” was a word the reporter on the scene used a lot. In the darkness of the canyon behind her, groggy families evacuated their homes, children asleep in their parents' arms.
From the moment I punched my time card the next morning, everything was chaos. All the techs were gathered in the hallways outside the labs, whispering chemical terms like crazy. I got to the front desk and all fifteen lines were blinking. I took a deep breath and dug in. “Dejun Enterprises, good morning. I'm sorry, Mr. Dejun is not in, would you like to leave a message? I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that. Dejun Enterprises, good morning.”