CJ objected, but Dorothy put up a hand.
“It’s alright, CJ. Really.” She looked as if she would say more, but she stopped and let her eyes fall to the sleeping dog. When she looked back at CJ, she wore a resigned smile. “You haven’t come home since you left for college—that’s a pretty clear indication of the regard you hold for your family.”
“You have no idea what kind of regard I hold for the family,” CJ said, irritated both by the fact that he’d been drawn into an uncomfortable conversation, and because he couldn’t exactly argue against his mother’s accusation with the sort of vehemence a legitimate denial would have required.
“None of us are idiots,” Dorothy said. After a pause, she added, “Well, maybe your father is. But the rest of us are pretty sharp.”
CJ threw up his hands. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mom.”
“Then you’re either obtuse or a liar,” she said. She pursed her lips as if remembering something distasteful. “The way you write about us . . .”
“I write fiction. That’s all.”
She shook her head. “No you don’t. No sir. You might as well call every one of your books a memoir.” He was about to interrupt, but she cut him off before he could start. “Don’t get smart with me, mister. I haven’t seen you in almost twenty years, but I’m still your mother and I won’t have it, you hear?”
She stopped and waited to see if he would say anything— which he didn’t—before she continued.
“You write with all the stuff reviewers like. Grand themes, big words, endings you have to think about for weeks before you can figure out what happened. But everyone here can see themselves on those pages.”
“People see what they want to see,” he shot back.
She shook her head. “You don’t get it.”
“I get it just fine, Mom.”
She gave him a reproachful look, lips pursed, before saying, “You’re a wonderful writer, CJ. You earned your award and I’m proud of you. But it’s not fiction, not all of it.”
The raised voices had wakened Thor, and Dorothy watched as he stood and yawned. She pulled another cigarette from the pack in her pocket and lit it.
“Your soul is on the pages, son,” she said after taking a long draw. “Right there for everyone to see. It’s not what you write about; it’s how you write it. And that’s what they can’t stand. They’re afraid people will see into your soul—see what kind of people they—we—are.”
CJ was dumbfounded. He hadn’t come here for literary criticism—not from his chain-smoking mother. Worse, he could almost see what she meant. He didn’t doubt that his soul was on the pages; in fact, he might have even read something like that in a review of his work. At the time he’d thought it a compliment. Writing had always been cathartic, and didn’t writers often use the written word to explore the weighty issues that kept them up at night? And there’d been a lot keeping him up at night, especially over the last few years. Of course it would be on the pages. Coming from his mother, though, it was an accusation.
And he wasn’t much good at accusations—not from Janet, and not from his mother. And there was no way he was going to field questions about his soul. So he did the only thing he could think to do. He gathered up his dog, kissed his mother on the cheek, and walked out the door.
When he stepped out onto the porch, just as the screen door was about to shut behind him, his mother launched her parting shot.
“I know what you think your brother did,” she said.
For the briefest of moments he froze on the porch, but then willed his legs to move forward.
It was a strange feeling sitting in a barstool in a place one’s own father frequented, a place that filled his memory with images of drinking Coke from a pilsner glass and scrounging quarters from bar patrons so he could play pinball with his brother. CJ came near to growing up in Ronny’s, at least during his earlier years, before his mother impressed upon his father the unseemliness of taking the boys with him to the bar. But Ronny’s elicited nothing but pleasant feelings in CJ.
Later, when he was in high school and knew that his father was playing cards somewhere else, CJ considered it a triumph to come in here, belly up to the bar, and order a beer of