“Well,” he said, which over the course of now eleven Tuesdays he had come to understand was a more polite way to warm up to his exit, as opposed to simply walking out the door.
“Wait a minute,” his mother said, and he suppressed a groan. Thirteen Tuesdays ago—before, before—he might have released it. But he didn’t now.
He didn’t really have anything to groan at his mother about. He never had.
He was lucky she was his family.
She was balling up Leonard’s blanket haphazardly, shoving it into the basket she kept by her chair. Outside, with everything for the animals, his mother was almost ruthlessly organized. But in the house, she had a much more…casual approach. So when she stood and drew him back toward her small den, he was not surprised by the mess on her desk. She had her fists set on her hips and she was saying, “Now where did I—oh, there it is,” then she was bending over and shoving a stack of god knew what out of the way.
When she straightened, she was holding a few crinkled sheets of white paper, paper-clipped messily together.
“Printed this out at the library!” she said.
Again, he did not groan. In fairness to the impulse, though, his mother printing out things at the library for him did have a groan-worthy history, back in the early days after the fire. Anything she could find—treatments, testimonials from victims with similar injuries, sometimes even accounts of other fires, as though it would soothe him to know that the one he’d lived through wasn’t unique—she would bring to him like this, on these white sheets, with these little paper clips.
“It’s about something called the Paris Syndrome,” she said, and then she was doing the thing that she did back in those early days. Licking her index finger and paging right into the thing, like she was getting ready to read it off. “You ever hear of that?”
“Don’t think so,” he said, but already he didn’t like this—what it meant, that his mom printed out this article the same way she’d printed out articles about burn trauma. He knew he had not toldher much about Paris; he knew what she knew was mostly confined to Michael.
And sure.
Not talking to Michael in twelve weeks was pretty traumatic.
But he didn’t want her to think he had some kind of syndrome.
“Well, I thought you’d enjoy it,” she said. “It’s about how people get this big idea about Paris, about how perfect it’ll be. And when they get there, it’s a complete disappointment! It’s more complex than that, actually, there’s an actual psychiatric condition, but—”
He took the article from her. Folded it longways and tucked it into his back pocket.
That is definitely not what I have from Paris, he thought.It isn’t a disappointment at all. You’d hardly believe how not-disappointing it is.
“I’ll read it,” he promised her gently, then he bent and kissed her wrinkled cheek, and she patted his scarred one. Ten Tuesdays, they’d done that, and every time she looked like he’d held out the whole world to her. Happier than she had looked even on the day he’d bought her this farm.
He waved at Peter as he left, made his way back home, his heart kicking up as he got closer. It was a ritual, waiting until he got home, until the hardest parts of the hardest day of his week were over, until he finally walked in his front door and realized that, this time, it had not been quite as hard as the week before, or the week before that.
Until he realized that he was not, in fact, really miserable at all.
But he was not…he was notnot miserableenough. Not yet.
He wasn’t quite sure what it would take.
But he knew it would take something.
So he kept this ritual.
He went to the small table in his kitchen. He slid the article from his mom out of one of his back pockets and set it down—hewould read it, eventually, since she’d gone to the trouble, but not tonight—and from the other, he drew out his phone.
A swipe, a tap. A text box that only ever had one of two messages. The same two, over and over again. Ten times, so far.
Would you still do it again?he wrote, pressing send, and then he darkened the screen, leaving the phone on top of the still-folded article about a syndrome he wouldn’t ever understand, no matter what he eventually read in there. He didn’t get nervous or miserable not to get an immediate reply.
Ten Tuesdays taught him that she didn’t always respond quickly.
So he took a long shower, washed off the day. Thought about all the places and people he tried not to let intrude too much on the difficult parts of his Tuesday. Thought about how much longer it might be until his Tuesdays could look different.
Not yet. Not quite yet.
Still, when he finally made his way back to the kitchen, he breathed a sigh of relief to see that she’d replied.
