The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (12 page)

When I look out at her family, all of you just sagging there in your pews, dwelling on her life, and now, as it must be, her death, I imagine she would like to have a few things uttered on her behalf. For starters, she might ask that you please stop calling her Mothball.

The Edens were stopped dead in all eight lanes, both directions. The Pedersons and Leifs were one long snake in the right-hand lane, their headlights turned on in the blazing sunlight, a pathetic gesture. Through the bright windshield of his rental car, the cook gazed at the dogs cluttering the rear window of his cousin's Lincoln ahead. It
was all torsos and heads back there, banging around, slathering.

The Leifs and the Pedersons were drunk, all of them, even the children of the children. Blitzed, they sprawled on the grandmother's living room furniture laughing about the woman's final days in her hospital bed, the visits they'd paid her, the things she'd said in the madness that preceded her death. Then, one of the Pedersons suggested that nothing would make the grandmother so proud as to look down on them and see another Swedish Castle. The cook immediately produced a wooden spoon and a paring stiletto like a card trick from his pants pockets.

There had been no resistance, only brief confusion, when the cook's cousin insisted on taking the part of the queen. The cook certainly had nothing to say about it. None of the boys had ever played the role of queen before, but if he protested, he would have had to speak directly to the man and so far he'd avoided doing so.

She didn't pick up. The cook studied his cell phone for several moments, checking and rechecking he'd dialed the correct number. He had. He dialed again and again received only his own recorded voice. The cook pondered the things she might be doing with their eleven children at this hour. He didn't leave a message.

Of course, there, down the hallway and around the corner, in one of the bedrooms of the grandmother's house, is the cook's cousin showing the cook a way to peel the skin off a hot dog, a way to suck on certain pieces of candy, a way to play a musical instrument with the lips and cheeks of the mouth. The cook is nine, ten, and eleven there; the cook's cousin fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen.

The queen strode from one side of the living room to the other in a tiara and cape. The monologue was pretty good, obviously prepared: “What must a mother do to her daughters, what must a daughter do to her mothers, her many mothers, to induce harmony like a child in the home?” The queen allowed her question a silent moment, then answered
it with a firm fist on the top of the piano. “Harmony must be sired! You cannot wait for harmony. You cannot seduce harmony. You must beget such things.” Oh god, he was good, the new Pederson queen; the cook could admit that his cousin was a very good queen indeed.

Still not home, or you're not picking up. I'm worried. Also, I'm obviously sorry I didn't get that flight. Also, I'm drunk. This was harder than I thought. Listen. Look, tell Inger to go to that orientation tomorrow without me; he'll be fine. Have the Ingvilds drive him if he gives you crap. They owe us, anyway. Look, I'm sorry. Everyone here is sad, worse than I can remember.

The cook's cousin left the house to smoke a cigarette and to let his dogs out of the Lincoln to run them. He had three dogs total, it now appeared; the cook watched them from inside the house, through the kitchen window. The grandmother's front yard wasn't large, and it shared a small fenceless lawn with the neighbors on either side. The queen, still in his tiara, threw a blue racquetball for the dogs to
charge after. The dogs were large, muscular. They ran after the ball with force, fought and wrangled over the thing like it was raw meat, and then they returned it to the queen's feet with a sort of palsy. They did this numerous times. They were ridiculously oversized compared to their owner, and when the queen picked the ball up and held it above his head, the animals propped their legs on his shoulders and lapped the man's face with their tongues. The cook considered whether the cousin's head might fit inside the mouth of one of the dogs.