You should’ve listened to your mother.
“You nuh-nuh-nuh—”
I nuh-nuh-nuh?
“You n-never even met her.”
She told you what would happen, though. You just didn’t believe her.
Even after all these years Rub didn’t like to think about his mother, who’d tried her best for him. As a child he’d been slow to talk, going on three before he uttered his first word. He’d been named Robert, after his father, but she wanted to call him Rob, since her husband was Bob. But Rub had struggled with the sound, indeed with many sounds, and before long it became clear that his speech would be seriously impeded. It took him so long to spit out the R sound that he was exhausted, and what followed sounded more like ubb than obb, so his mother had decided to just go with that. Later, seeing how lonely and friendless Rub was at school, where his stammer made him the butt of endless jokes, she’d recommended Jesus, who she claimed was the most important friend to have, though she couldn’t have anticipated Sully. Sometimes she took Rub to the ramshackle church she visited on Sundays where they talked about Jesus and the rapture at the end of the world, but one week a man brought snakes, and Rub was so terrified that after that his mother left him home with his father. And Jesus became, for him, just the man on the calendar.
Every month there was a new one to contemplate — January Jesus, June Jesus, December Jesus — with all these as constant and reliable as the seasons, as ubiquitous as time itself. Though Rub’s circumstances grew increasingly dire as the months unfolded, Calendar Jesus always bore the same beatific expression. Even carrying the heavy cross, his head crowned with jagged thorns, his palms punctured (a discrete drop of bright red blood on each), Jesus remained serene, and Rub, an anxious child, hoped that when he grew up, he, too, would find such grace in the face of hardship, that his more or less constant longing would yield to tranquil acceptance. Of course this wasn’t to be, and twenty years later when he accidentally punctured his own left palm with a nail gun, he discovered that if you weren’t the Son of God (or at least a distant cousin) serenity in the face of that kind of pain was not an option.
His poor mother. Most of the time she bore a kind, faraway expression that made Rub wonder if she could read the future and if that was why she worried about him so much. But maybe it was her own future, her own loneliness, she was contemplating, not his. Though he and his father were right there, to Rub she seemed every bit as forlorn as he was, and for this he blamed himself. While he knew he was just a boy and no proper companion for a grown woman, he felt guilty anyway. She never left the house except to go to church, for which his father religiously ridiculed her. You might as well believe in the Easter Bunny, he liked to tell her, which was how Rub had come to understand there wasn’t one. Because he loved his mother and knew it was what she wanted, he tried praying to Calendar Jesus for a while. She’d taught him how, but obviously he wasn’t doing it right, because when he finished saying the words he wasn’t filled to overflowing with the Savior’s love, like she said he’d be, but even more empty and alone than before. His father? Rub knew it was a sin, but he hated the man even as he loved him, for his nasty laugh and his refusal to ever have a kind word for anyone. In the end, though, he came around to his father’s view with respect to Jesus, after which the Son of God assumed a status more or less equivalent to the Bunny with whom he shared a holiday.
Why, then, Rub had wondered many times since, had he grieved his father’s passing? Because that’s what boys were supposed to do when their fathers died? Because his mother, who had every reason to be happy that the man was gone, had sobbed so pitifully? How could she possibly miss a man who’d belittled her as naturally as he’d breathed? By the same token, how could Rub himself? One of his clearest memories was of one Sunday morning when his mother had gone off to church, leaving the two of them alone in the house. He could still see the old man sitting in the corduroy armchair that no one else could sit in and watching, with an expression of sneering wonderment, as Rub tried desperately to communicate something of importance, he no longer could remember exactly what. His stammer was always at its worst around his father, words turning to concrete shards in his mouth. Part of the reason he continued to struggle, he now recalled, was that he’d actually managed to get out part of what he wanted to say and mistook his father’s curious expression to indicate interest. But then he saw it wasn’t curiosity at all, simply disgust. “Why don’t you just give up?” was what his father wanted him to explain.
“How dare you?” said a voice he didn’t recognize. Neither Rub nor his father had heard his mother return. She’d just materialized there in the doorway, and her fury was so focused that she not only sounded but also looked like another woman entirely. He’d never known her to raise her voice to his father before, but here she was, glaring at him, shaking with rage, and in her hand a gleaming kitchen knife. At that moment his mother, who could often calm his stammer by simply resting a cool, dry hand on top of his, looked perfectly willing to kill the man whose verbal abuse she took, day after day, as if it were her due.
“You,” she went on, the usual quaver in her voice now absent as she pointed the tip of the blade at his father. “You’re the reason he’s like he is.”
Rub’s father, his mouth open, as if on a hinge, seemed less frightened by this knife-wielding specter than dumbstruck by her words. If so, he was no less stunned than Rub himself, who tried desperately to make sense of what she was saying. He knew all too well that his stammer was worse in his father’s presence, but how could he be to blame for the affliction itself? If Rub’s mouth didn’t work properly, if he couldn’t make it behave, how could it be anyone’s fault but his? Hadn’t his mother always told him it was nobody’s fault? Hadn’t the lady at the university she’d taken him to see — a speech therapist, she was called — concurred? Rub had wondered if they were just trying to make him feel better and, if so, fine. He didn’t object to being let off the hook. But this was different. Had his mother lost her mind? How could his stupid mouth be his father’s fault?
“You’re a hateful, hateful man,” she continued as Rub looked on in horror. “Your only joy is tormenting the people who love you.”
His father started to say something, but no sound came out of his mouth, which was just as well because Rub’s mother wasn’t finished. She pointed the sharp end of the knife at Rub now.
“That boy actually looks up to you, you hateful man. He doesn’t know there’s no such thing as pleasing you. He doesn’t understand that you enjoy watching him suffer. And you know what? Neither do I. So explain it to us. How can it feel good that this boy, your child, is so terrified every waking moment that he wets the bed at night?”
When Rub heard this, he could only stare at the floor in shame. He had no idea his father knew about the bed. His mother had told him it would be their secret, but clearly she hadn’t kept her promise. You’re the reason he’s like he is, she’d said earlier, and what she must’ve meant by that now crystallized. She wasn’t just talking about his stammer but rather about everything that was wrong with him, his totality as a disappointing boy.
He also understood something else. His mother’s rage, her willingness not just to defend him but to shift the blame for his failures to his father, were in direct response to his father’s question: Why don’t you just give up? At first he’d assumed he was advising him to pause, calm down, collect himself and begin again from a more tranquil state. After all, that was what his mother and the speech therapist always encouraged him to do. Now, though, thanks to his mother’s fury, he understood that what his father had actually wanted to know was why, given the entirety of his experience, Rub didn’t give up altogether and stop believing in the possibility of good outcomes.