Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,18

was holding a mostly empty glass of red wine.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked. It wasn’t an accusation, just a way to make conversation during a commercial break. She never really paid much attention to where I went or what I did.

Around, I signed.

“I love it there. Great appetizers. Hey, would you get a girl a refill?” I brought the bottle of wine in from the kitchen. When she turned around to take it, she noticed the bouquet of sunflowers I’d left on the counter.

“What are those?”

I’m going to a party tonight.

My mom did a double take. Then a triple take. Then a quadruple take.

Stop that.

“I’m sorry. But, I mean, this is voluntary? You haven’t joined a cult? You haven’t been brainwashed or hypnotized or anything?”

I don’t think so.

“And the flowers, then . . . must be for a girl.” Her face lit up. I shook my head, but it was too late. My mom was clearly a little bit tipsy, and this would’ve been exciting news anyway. “They are! They’re for a girly girlity girl! A bonita señorita!”

Shut up.

“Okay. I’ll zip it.” But she was still smiling in that infuriating parental way, like she was in on a secret shared between her and all other adults ever. “Just tell me her name.”

No.

“Is it Bonita the Señorita?”

Shut up.

“Fine, fine, fine.”

Her show came back on, and we watched it together. Then we watched another one while I ate dinner. It was only a little after seven when I finished, but my mom had already passed out. She was slack-jawed and drooling on a couch cushion—the perfect candidate for a malicious Instagram post—but I wasn’t that mean.

My mom had been a pretty woman when she was younger. I’d seen photos of her as a long-legged, almost ditzy-looking teenager, throwing her hair back in convertibles and posing lazily on beaches, wearing outfits that made my skin crawl (thinking of your parents being young is like thinking of Winnie-the-Pooh going to the bathroom: just fucking weird ). But the past few years had been rough on her. After my dad died, she’d had to get a full-time job. There’d been life insurance, but after replacing the car and paying off my hospital bills and flying family members out from Colombia for the funeral, the money that was left over turned out to be just enough for a couple of movie tickets and a medium popcorn. She’d always liked traveling, so she trained to be a flight attendant for Delta. Turned out it wasn’t as glamorous as she’d expected. The pay was shit, and her seniority was terrible, so she ended up getting saddled with tons of all-nighters. Then there were all the hours she had to spend on her feet, the obnoxious passengers, the restless nights in cheap airport hotels, the crap airplane food, the bone-dry air that she blamed for her expanding LTE network of crow’s-feet.

She’d been away since the previous morning on a layover in Dallas. Of course she was fried. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. Her eyes were unfocused, blurry with fatigue and at least half a bottle of wine.

“Marco?” she said.

I shook my head, waited for her to recognize me as her son. But her eyes were filling up with tears now. “I was having a dream about you.”

I’m not him, I signed.

“You were right over there,” she said, pointing at the other end of the couch. “We were watching The Simpsons together.” She wiped at the sticky corners of her mouth with the back of her hand, then at her wet cheeks. “It was so real,” she said, and I could tell she’d finally phased back to reality.

I know.

She moaned a little bit when she stood up, took my arm like an invalid. I led her upstairs and put her in bed.

“Good night, Parky.”

Good night.

I went up to my bedroom to get dressed. It took me a good half hour to choose my outfit; I hadn’t quite realized just how much stuff Zelda had bought me. Finally I settled on the shirt with the red collar, a gray jacket, and the one pair of jeans that I could get into without contortions. Then I added the two props that turned the whole thing into a costume: a silver wig and a little orange-brown tail tufted with white. (Get it? No? Well, you have a few minutes here to try to work it out.) I didn’t have a mirror in my bedroom, so I could only hope I looked presentable.

Back downstairs,