A Song for Mary by Dennis Smith

Author:Dennis Smith [SMITH, DENNIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780446930352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 1999-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

I throw Tom Sawyer on the kitchen table. I am going to also tell my mother about all the books I’ve been reading at Kips. The kitchen light is out, and I can see her legs in the living room. She is sitting on the couch, reading a magazine. She is always reading something whenever she sits down. She hardly ever watches the television. This one is the second television Uncle Andy has given us, but the first one worked a little better. The new one is probably older and has too many lines rolling from the top to the bottom.

My mother has been pretty mad at me since I ran away, and I wonder how she’ll act with me now. Mothers, I think, usually forget about it when their kids hurt their feelings, but when it comes to running away, I don’t know.

I sit next to her. She kisses me but doesn’t say anything. She is staring at me, and I wonder if she smells the cigarette smoke of the one cigarette I had before I went to Kips. A long time passes as she continues to stare at me, as if I was a painting at the Metropolitan or a statue.

“How are you?” she says finally.

I lean in next to her, and I inhale the smell of Clorox coming from her white blouse. Anything white in my house smells of bleach, because my mother is such a stickler about getting things clean. Her hands, too, usually smell of Clorox, because when she is not reading she is always with her hands in the sink, washing shirts and things for people. It is a hard smell, but it is such a clean smell that it is relaxing. And I do need to relax as I figure out a way to ask her about my father being in the hospital.

“Okay,” I answer.

“I’ve been reading this interesting story about the Pope,” she says. “Let me read it to you.”

Good. If she wants to read to me, that means running away is something she is forgetting about.

My mother loves to read to us. When we were kids, my mother used to read the Letters to the Editor and the Inquiring Photographer columns to us every day, and get excited about the things she was reading.

“Yes,” she would say, “I agree, and we should all write to President Truman about that,” or “That is such a load of baloney that they could get rich by selling it in Brooklyn.”

“How come, Mommy?” I once asked her.

“People love baloney in Brooklyn,” she said.

And so she is reading now about how the Pope was the first Pope ever to come to America, when he was a monsignor or something, and her voice is light and singsong. She has a real New York accent, and when she wants to say bottle, she says ba-ull. The nuns are always harping about the New York accent, like saying toid for third, and that the bosses at the insurance companies will never give us jobs if we have New York accents.

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