Five(36)

So she finds relief in the repetition of laundry and vacuuming, in looking after Sonny, in keeping going, in trudging through to the end of each gray day until it becomes black night.

Sonny is sad too, of course, but he is so young, time and reality are still so flexible and malleable for him, that she knows his memories of his father have become a story, a favorite fairy tale imprinted on his mind that he will always remember fondly. That he remembers his father’s voice, not from the memory of hearing it spoken, but from how it sounds on the family videos they watch on repeat.

Although the videos start to replace his actual memories, they do not replace the feeling that is having a big, loud Scottish father with a scratchy beard and broad shoulders from where Sonny could see the whole world. Just before he falls asleep, Sonny can still feel that feeling sometimes, of sitting on his father’s shoulders and reaching for the sky, but he has never told his mother about it because he has learned not to say things that will make her too sad.

Every morning Sonny greets her with just one word. “Hugs,” he says, rubbing his eyes, and she moves her coffee cup before he jumps on her or throws himself at her or finds another way of attaching his whole body to her torso and squeezing her so that she is smothered in his love and faint, underlying anxiety.

She knows that part of the reason for his morning ritual is the consistency and repetition of it, and part of it is the need for his parasympathetic nervous system to find calm through physical pressure. And part of it is sadness, missing the man who was strong enough to swing him around by the arms, and tackle him, and fireman-lift him, and pretend to box with him, always getting knocked out in first round, always there to absorb his fierce, constant physicality. She is sorry that she cannot do these things because she lacks the physical strength to do them; roughhousing and wrestling do not occur to her as demonstrations of love, they are not natural to her, they are the language of love between fathers and sons that she does not know. But hugs she can do.

Dinner, however, she can’t. And she doesn’t.

All the other domestic chores she manages—the dishes, bleaching the shower, taking out the rubbish, sorting the recycling—but not dinner. She cannot bear dinner.

If she were alone, she just wouldn’t eat it. The thinking, buying, preparing, cooking, paying attention to time, not burning, adding vegetables, caring, giving a shit about what it tastes like or looks like are just more than she is capable of.

Her husband cooked. He made fresh pasta from scratch and knew how to roast a chicken and understood things about steak. She has not eaten any of those things since he died. The thought of him, of a dishcloth on his shoulder, his head bowed, his face in profile focused on slicing garlic or squeezing a lemon, stops her breathing. She literally cannot breathe if she picks up pasta, chicken, steak, lemon, or garlic in the supermarket, if she tries to nonchalantly put them in her shopping trolley like they are just food and not granite rubble filling her pockets to weigh her down while she drowns in the river of her grief.

But there is Sonny. Always.

Growing Sonny, hungry Sonny, who must be fed. So she buys ready-made pancakes and puts them in the toaster and tells Sonny that it is “Breakfast for Dinner Week.” And they eat pancakes and cereal every night. For “Sandwich Week” they have ham and cheese on toast for seven days, maybe eight.

During “Chicken Nugget Week,” he says, “Mummy, I think in other people’s houses sometimes they have different dinners.”

“Who told you that?” she asks, curiously, wondering if any adults at school have asked him about things at home and gotten onto the topic of food and now know about her struggle with dinner.

“The TV,” he says.

“All right,” she says, overcome with guilt now that she realizes the depth of her dinner negligence. “Let’s go then,” and she takes him to Pizza Express.

They have not eaten in a restaurant for a long time, maybe a year. She is nervous. She orders a large pinot grigio to help with the noise, the people, the strangeness of strangers’ laughter in public. She marvels at how people continue to live, and eat, and sing happy birthday. She wonders how it is that they don’t know that her husband has died, and how it can be that his death has not affected them.

“Look at the ice, Mama, look how fast!” Sonny shouts.

He is delighted with his blue drinking glass. It contains water and a few cubes of ice. Sonny loves spinning things, and when he discovers that by spinning the glass just a little bit he can make a whirlpool in his drink, he is beside himself with glee.

“Sonny, my baby, that’s very interesting, but we don’t want it to spill and make a mess,” she says, calmly.

“But Mama, look!” he shouts again. She is conscious that a woman two tables away has glanced over her shoulder at his exclamation. A man near them has not looked up but has turned his head slightly and shifted in his seat. Luna moves to stop Sonny, but he has already sloshed water out of the glass onto the table.

“Sonny,” she says, in a calm but warning tone. He is overstimulated by the restaurant, the noise, the people, the sound, she sees it. She should have come at a quieter time. She knows her child, so despite the over-the-shoulder glances of strangers, she knows the answer is not to grab the glass from him but to talk him down.

“Baby, it’s wonderful, I know, the whirlpool, but in my bag I have—”

She reaches into her bag to look for the spinning toys he’s obsessed with, the top and an old Nine Inch Nails CD with a spiral on it that Sonny finds absorbing when he spins it on a flat surface. But the pinot grigio has blunted her reflexes. She is too late.