My mother ordered two small cones for here and a sundae to go. The sundae came in a cup with a clear dome lid. I put my hand around the base to feel the warmth of the hot fudge racing to the bottom, melting the ice cream. There wouldn’t be much left by the time we got home. “We should have gotten this to go,” my mother said. “That would have been the smart thing.” I nibbled away my cone’s chocolate shell. “Though it’s nice having some alone time with my baby boy. And I’m not sure your brother deserves much of anything tonight.”
“He’s not that bad,” I said. I took a bite of my ice cream cone, leaning over the booth’s table. The person before us had left an issue of the local newspaper, sports page up.
“You’re just too sweet,” my mother said. “Always have been. Mr. Marshmallow.” Her words seemed like a trick. She was saying nice things to pile on the guilt, to make me confess about the lies I had told about my brother. But once this story was out, I knew I would only feel relieved until she asked what else I was hiding.
“How did you get the van back?” I said.
“I walked down there and gave them all the money I got for our stuff. And when that wasn’t enough, I called your dad. He does owe us, you know. So he showed up and said he would pay the entire bill if I wanted. You know your dad, he has his good moments.” She took a big bite of ice cream, let it melt in her mouth instead of swallowing it whole. “Your brother does too. He’s just getting bigger, growing older, that’s all.” She took another bite and was already down to the cone. “You know, that stuff your brother said about me and your dad…”
He didn’t say anything. I made it up.
“… some things are very tough to forgive, let alone forget.”
My mother held up the remains of her cone. She seemed like she wanted to say more about my dad, but she didn’t.
“I’m going to run to the ladies’ room. You finish up.”
She slid out of the booth, and to avoid her glance as she walked away, I studied the sports page in front of me. In the center was a baseball player at bat, swinging for the fences. I thought of the home run derbies my brother and I had, behind the old folks’ home. I thought of my brother home alone, in the field out back, throwing the ball up to himself, hitting homers without me. Then I thought of him hitting with Chris.
I flipped over to the news. Our city was too small to have a paper with separate sections during the week. There was the news on the front, the sports on the back, and a glossy insert in the middle, advertising sales at Leavenworth’s one grocery store. I licked my cone and scanned the headlines. The top story was on the proposal to build a new public library, a proposal voted down without a single yea. “We don’t have the money,” explained one councilman, whose face was pictured next to the quote bubble, like the whole thing was a cartoon, “not if we want to maintain the correctional facilities.” And as if to further prove the councilman’s point, below the quote was an editorial about the prison break, called “Nothing ‘Strange’ About Recent Escape.” The article blasted the government for hiring “kids” to guard their prisons, teenagers straight out of high school who had few other options for work, and who jumped at the signing bonus offered by the state. What can we expect when we send baby-faced teens to guard the worst? Should we really be surprised that someone like the Stranger would slip through the cracks? The article went on to list the recent escapes from all of Leavenworth’s prisons, never mentioning whether the criminals were caught or not. Never saying if they were still walking among us.
My mother returned from the restroom. “You ready?”
“One second,” I said, and carefully tore the article out of the paper.
“For your brother?” I nodded, and her face seemed to ease. “You guys still love that stuff, huh?” She grabbed the melted sundae. “All right, I guess a little excitement won’t hurt anybody.”
* * *
My mother made me sit up front, keep her company as we took the long way home. I didn’t ask why we had to go the long way, but imagined that she felt bad for the van — locked up at the mechanic’s for so long, not knowing when its owner would come to take it home — and wanted to make up for lost time.
We got off the main street and took one of the side roads, driving deeper into the city, to an area crowded with old houses, big and nice, but scary at night. Each had multiple floors, some with porches on both levels, and were inhabited by people whose families had been here since the beginning, my mother told me. We drove another few blocks, and my mother talked about how these people had watched the entire city grow around them, seen the good and the bad. They were there when the Army rolled in the materials to build the military prison. At first the people weren’t so sure, she said, and from their porches, they eyed the soldiers with suspicion. But the general in charge visited each family, traveling door-to-door to assure them that once the prison was built — by its future inhabitants, the prisoners themselves — nothing would change. No one was asking anyone to alter their ways.
Years later, there came word that the city was thinking about building a large prison of its own, instead of the state university originally planned. The people got off their porches for this. They took their wives and children down to the mayor’s office to protest, their angry faces burning orange in the lamplight. But when they got there they were told sorry, they could not see the mayor. You can go home, it’s already been decided. The prison would be good for the city’s growth, it was said, good for the economy. In addition to all the jobs created, the inmates themselves would work for free at the nearby coal mines, giving the people of the city more time to spend with their families, more time to do fun things like fish and swim. And unlike a university, which could be afforded by few and came with no guarantees, the prison could always be counted on. Because as long as there were people, it was reasoned, there would be crime, and people to commit crime. And it would be our job to lock these people up, to watch over them every hour of every day and on through the night, to make sure those who had done wrong would never get out to do anything bad again.
“No one mentioned what the prison might do to the city’s spirit,” my mother said, finishing her history lesson, and I saw another glimpse of why, before my parents split and my mother had to go full-time at the golf course, she wanted to be a teacher. “Sometimes I try to imagine what it would look like if they had built the school instead. How things would be different.” A car sped by, its headlights washing over my mother’s faraway face. “But who knows,” she said. “It would probably all turn out the same.”
We drove a few more blocks until I had no idea where we were. The van started to smell funny, like someone had poured pancake syrup on the engine. I rolled down my window, looked for a familiar landmark — the unpainted dinosaur at the abandoned fairgrounds, the big hill I never got to sled down — something to show us home.
“Where are we?” I said.
My mother wasn’t listening. She was paying attention to the van, which had started to shake as we coasted down a narrow road. The shaking got worse when we stopped at a four-way stop sign. There were no cars around and the houses had their lights off.
The van gave a big shiver, and my mother patted the steering wheel. “It just needs a little help,” she said. “That’s all.”
“I thought it was fixed.”