The Witch (12 page)

The prep cook quit, as did the dishwasher. The waitresses turned indolent and stole drinks from the bar. Nikos took over more and more of the kitchen work himself, a towel wrapped around his waist for an apron, mopping at the sweat on his forehead so it wouldn't land in the food. “Why don't you let the guy go? Get a new cook?” Gabe ventured to ask, but Nikos shook his head.

“The poor bastard got noplace else. Nobody else. He stay here where we can keep an eye on him.” He nodded at Sam, who was guarding the walk-in cooler with a corkscrew.

Clearly it was time for Gabe to move on. He was neglecting his music while he stayed here, working more and more hours for less and less money. He was an artist, after all, even if he was a fitful and struggling one, with ambitions that went beyond the daily, grubby toil of putting one coin next to another and then another. Everything in the restaurant spoke of age and defeat: the row of booths whose seats and backs showed patches of silver tape, the red-lit, shrine-like bar, the cartoonish mural of a Greek fishing village with its foreshortened boats and houses and twin blue smears of sea and sky.

Gabe cashed in his tips, took off his clip-on tie and brocade vest and laid them on the cashier's stand. He was free to go. And he was glad for that, although he was coming to believe that in
freedom there was also a good portion of selfishness, a refusal to be bound up in another's life.

“Psst! Buddy!” And here was Sam, cowering next to the coatrack, reaching out to Gabe with clawlike, scrabbling hands. “Buddy! You got to get me out of here!”

—

Tim missed his mother. She had been a good mother, calm and constant, nursing them through illness and injury, refereeing their tantrums, dispensing justice. She sang them nursery songs and read to them from the big storybook with the gilt-edged pages, stories about talking trees and magic lanterns and journeys to far places, stories with happy endings. She had been the sweet to the father's sour, interceding during his worst spells, talking him down from whatever high ledge he proclaimed himself ready to jump from. When you thought about it, the only surprise was that she'd put up with things as long as she had. But then, they could not bear to really think about it.

Tim was the baby of the family, he'd grown up constantly hearing it, and had absorbed all the teasing and humiliations involved. Being the baby implied that there was something favored about his position, that allowances were made for him, special treatment given, but also that he was weak and unworthy. So maybe it was a weakness to miss her, and he didn't say anything to the others.

Tim was the only one to see her the night she left. He'd been asleep, he was the kid who had slept through the tree falling on the roof—another one of the family jokes—but on this night, something woke him.

He opened his eyes to darkness. He still slept upstairs then,
and from the kitchen he heard small, snicking sounds, as of someone trying to be careful about opening and closing drawers.

Tim got up and went to the head of the stairs. A dim fluorescent light was turned on, the light over the kitchen sink. The furtive sounds continued. It would not have alarmed him if there had been more light, more noise, one of his brothers or his father pawing through the refrigerator, as they did often enough.

He eased himself down, stair by stair, his heart beating fast, the roof of his mouth dry, wondering if he should have grabbed a bat or golf club or something, wondering if he'd really be able to do that, take a swing at somebody. At the bottom of the stairs he angled himself to get a better view of the room, then stepped inside. “Mom? What are you doing?”

His mother turned and gave him a weird, almost hostile look, then she tried to rearrange her face into its usual Mom-like exasperation. “Nothing. Go back to bed.”

“What are you doing?” Tim repeated. The clock over the stove read two a.m. She was dressed to go out, including shoes and her puffy jacket. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I can't find . . .” She kept her voice at a whisper. “There used to be a flashlight here someplace.”

“Why do you need a flashlight?”

“Shhh. I just thought it would be . . . a good thing to have.” She opened a drawer, closed it, then gave up and stood in the center of the room, waiting for Tim to either go away, or—what? What was he supposed to do?

“Should I go get Dad?” he asked, but his mother raised both hands, shaking her head, and in one hand were her car keys, and next to the garage door he saw the suitcase, which had been there all along. “Mom, what the hell?”

“Oh, sweetie.” She came toward him, hugged him. The puffy coat enveloped him and, somewhere beneath it he felt her small, unquiet arms. “I am so sorry. I didn't want to have to tell any of you, I know that's cowardly, but it was the only way I could do it. I'm sorry.”

“Do what?” he said, although by now it was beginning to form, even as he did not yet believe it. “Where are you going?”

She stepped back from him, sagged and shrank into herself. “I don't know. I haven't thought that much about it.”

They were still whispering. “Did you and Dad . . .” He didn't believe he was asking these things. “. . . have a fight or something?”

“Not really. He didn't do anything, I mean, anything different.” His mother looked down at her suitcase, as if waiting for it to take part in the conversation.

“So . . .” It was all too confounding. “When are you coming back?”

She didn't answer. She did not mean to come back. His heart hardened.

She said, “You could come with me. Sure you could. I'll wait for you to get dressed, go get dressed and pack some clean clothes. I'd feel so much better if you came too. I thought I wanted to be alone but I don't, really. I just don't want to be here in the middle of everything. Everybody. Please come.”

“Mom, this is so crazy.”

“Maybe it is.” She tried laughing, but bit off the end of it. “We can go wherever you want. We'll get maps. See the big wide world. We'll live like pirates, you always liked those pirate movies, didn't you?”

He didn't like the way she was talking, rushed and fake. She didn't sound like herself. “No, Mom.”

“You could drive. I'll show you how.”

He was only fourteen. The idea of going somewhere, anywhere, was nothing he was prepared for. What was she asking of him? He could not do it. He was too young and unready. Fear made him harsh. “Yeah, and if I hadn't shown up you would have left. Or if somebody else came downstairs you'd say the same to them.”

“No.”

“Sure you would. It's all bullshit.”

“No, baby. It's really, really hard.”

“Because you don't care about any of us. You're mad at Dad so you decide to take off, the hell with anybody else. Did you even leave him a note, huh?”

He was talking louder now, he watched her register this, watched her visibly droop and despair, knowing he could keep her here if he chose, either by raising the alarm or by simple guilt. Instead, from some confusion of hurt and spite and sympathy, he picked up her suitcase and opened the garage door. “Come on.”

His mother followed without objecting, and that was how Tim knew she truly wanted to leave. He put the suitcase in the trunk and opened the driver's door for her. He let her hug him again, giving nothing back, and watched her face through the car windshield as she mouthed Goodbye, Sorry, Love You. Then she looked over her shoulder to back the car out, and when she was clear of the garage he put the door down again.

Once it was established that she was gone, they didn't much talk about her among themselves. The father's official attitude was, If that's what she wants, screw her, and it was difficult to tell if that was the extent of his feelings. In time, Richard and Gabe moved out and only came around when they needed to
retrieve some of the things they'd stored in the garage or the attic. Every so often, the father assembled them in restaurants to mark occasions like birthdays and the unavoidable holidays. The wifeless house resisted celebrations.

For Tim's graduation from high school last spring, they ate Mexican food at a chain restaurant and his brothers passed him a number of slurpy strawberry margaritas. He drank them down and let them do their thing. He wasn't accustomed to being the center of anyone's attention, and he was glad when the reason for the gathering seemed to recede from view. The father held the menu close up, then at arm's length, as if trying to decipher a secret message. “What the hell are flautas?”

“Just get nachos, Dad, you'll be happier,” Richard said. He wasn't drinking anything but water. He'd put on some weight since his days of playing team sports and he was trying to work it off.

“They're these fried tortilla things with stuff inside them,” Gabe said. “I know, they sound like they have something to do with farts.” He liked to keep the jokes going when he was around the rest of them.

Tim sniggered. “Fartas, huh.”

“I'd like mine with beans, please.”

The two of them laughed like fools. “Another intellectual evening,” Richard remarked. He was glad he hadn't brought his girlfriend along, although everyone might have behaved better if she'd come.

The father put his menu down. “What I really want is a steak, they have steak here? Whose idea was it to come to this place anyway?”

“Mine,” Tim said. “I bet they have steak, Dad. We can ask the waitress. Or you could get steak fajitas.”

“Ah, never mind. I can get steak some other time.” The father was making an effort. He ordered the combo platter and looked around at the walls, which were decorated with sombreros and paper flowers and some gloomy, icon-like pieces of painted tin. “This is nice. A little atmosphere. I don't guess it's authentic or anything.”

“It's authentic Mexican restaurant,” Gabe offered. Tim thought this was funny too. He was buzzed. He was hoping nobody asked him, for the hundredth time, what he was going to do after graduation, and so far they hadn't. He was relieved to be done with school. He'd only promised to sign up for the community college courses to get everybody off his back. They weren't anything you had to keep doing.

The father's attention stirred then, and landed on Tim, probably because he'd been trying so hard to avoid it. “So,” the father said. “The graduate.”

“Yup.”

“With your whole life before you,” the father intoned, making it sound funereal.

“Yup.”

“Is that all you know how to say? That's brilliant. Your education has served you well. For something. At least try not to join the goddamn army. There's a shooting war going on, they need cannon fodder.”

“Who said he was joining the army?” Richard asked. “Why even bother worrying about it? You weren't going to run off and enlist, were you, Timmy?”

Tim shrugged. “Maybe I'd be good at it.” He had a moment's vision of how it would be, the hard parts of running and drilling and the people whose job it was to make you miserable, and how he would suck it up, take everything they dished out.

“Good at getting shot?” The father ha ha-ed.

“At being a soldier. It's something you can be good at.”

“Seriously?” Gabe said. “You'd want to do that? Serve your country?”

“I didn't say I wanted to. Just, I could if I had to.”

The father said, “Well you don't have to now, it's all volunteer. Volunteer, that's one word for it. These days it's kids signing up for the bonus money. The dead-enders who don't have anything else going for them.”

The sons were suddenly occupied with eating, giving it their total attention. The father wished he had not said that last, since it was a pretty good description of his youngest son. His wife had always said he was too hard on him, and Tim wasn't someone who responded to bullying, her name for it. Of course she had always shielded him, taken Tim's side. Her baby boy. It made him angry at his wife all over again, but of course she wasn't here, and so he was obliged to be angry at Tim instead.

The sons didn't look at one another, but all of them recognized the familiar destination of their family outings. The father always worked himself into one or another variety of bad mood. Look at him jabbing and stabbing at his food, as if it wasn't quite dead enough on the plate. They were used to him, his outsized and demanding presence in their lives. Of course they were resolved never to be like him. As if it would be hard to avoid falling into such an obvious, gaping hole, such an abyss! And yet each of them was afraid of finding in themselves some part of him: his arrogance, his anger, his loneliness.

—

Tim always wondered if it was his fault that his mother had not come back. Maybe if he had gone with her he might have talked
her into returning, sooner or later. He would have known what to say and his mother would have admitted that things weren't all that bad, she had just needed to get away for a little while. A happy ending, which meant everything going back to the way things were.

Instead there was this waiting and waiting, while the thing you were waiting for kept not happening, as his life itself was not yet really happening.

That Thanksgiving, the father surprised them by announcing that they were all invited—that is, expected—home. The father said that he and “a friend” would be preparing the holiday meal. What friend? the sons asked, and the father said she was just a lady he knew.

Tim got phone calls from Richard and from Gabe, asking him what was going on. Was the father dating somebody?
Dating
, meaning, having sex. Richard said, “That would be just weird. I mean, he and Mom are still married.”

“Actually, it's weird that they're still married,” Tim said.

“Yeah, okay. Who is this ‘friend'?”

“No clue.”

“Has he been going out at night, bringing women back to the house?”