So he was surprised again to find her in the kitchen humming a jaunty tune and not at all sheepish about what had transpired the night before. She was still in her robe and slippers, like most mornings, but also seemed to be in unusually high spirits, as if she were about to go on a long-anticipated vacation to an exotic port of call. It was all extremely disconcerting.
“I think Dad’s right,” Lincoln told her, pouring himself a bowl of cereal.
She stopped humming and looked him in the eye. “What else is new?”
Which brought him up short. After all, it wasn’t like she and his father argued all the time and he always took his father’s part. Last night’s was, in fact, the first real argument he could remember. Now here she was spoiling for yet another fight, this time with him. “Why spend all that money?” he continued, trying to sound reasonable and unbiased as he poured milk on his cereal and grabbed a spoon from the drawer. It was his intention to eat standing up as usual, leaning against the counter.
“Sit,” she told him. “There are things you don’t understand, and it’s high time you did.”
Grabbing the step stool from between the fridge and the kitchen counter, his mother climbed up onto the highest step. What she was after was on the top shelf of the cupboard, and far in the back. Lincoln watched, amazed and, yes, a little frightened. Had she hidden something up there where his father wouldn’t find it? What? A ledger of some sort, or maybe a book of photographs, something secret that would shed light on these things he supposedly didn’t understand? But no. She was reaching for a bottle of whiskey. Since he hadn’t moved away from the counter, she handed it down to him.
“Mom?” he said, because it was seven in the morning and, really, who was this strange woman? What had she done with his mother?
“Sit,” she repeated, and this time he was glad to obey, because his knees had jellied. He watched as she poured a slug of amber liquid into her coffee. Taking a seat across from him, she set the bottle on the table, as if to suggest she wasn’t done with it. He half expected her to offer him some. Instead she just sat there staring at him until, for some reason, he felt guilty and looked down at his cereal, which was getting soggy.
The gist of it was this. There were several facts about their lives of which he was ignorant, starting with the mine. Sure, he’d known that it was slipping, and that over the last several years the price of copper had tanked. Each year there were more layoffs, and the workers had again threatened to unionize, as if that would ever happen in Arizona. Eventually the mine would close, and the lives of all these men would be shaken. None of this was news. No, the news was that their lives might be shaken. Indeed, they already had been. Many of the extras—things they had that many of their neighbors didn’t, the in-ground pool, the groundskeeper, membership in the country club, a new car every other year—were thanks to her, she explained, to the money she’d brought to the marriage.
“But I thought—” he began.
“I know you did,” she told him. “You’ll just have to learn to think differently. Starting now.”
The night before, his father had attempted, as usual, to lay down the law. He refused to pay for any son of his to get educated in a part of the country he scorned for its snobbery and elitism; he’d come back a damn Democrat or, worse, as one of those long-haired Vietnam protesters who were on the TV every night. A private, liberal arts education back East would cost them five times what a “perfectly good” education could be had for right here in Arizona. To which his mother had replied that he was wrong—imagine her actually telling him any such thing!—because it would cost ten times more. She’d telephoned the admissions office at Minerva College and knew whereof she spoke. Not that cost was any concern of his, since she meant to pay for it. Furthermore, she continued—imagine, continuing!—she hoped their son would protest against a war that was stupid and immoral and, finally, that if Lincoln voted Democratic he wouldn’t be the only one in their tiny family to do so. So there.