Five(37)

“Mama, look!” he shouts again, and picks up the glass, hoists it in the air, and water spills on his head and seat and ice cubes clatter to the floor, and before she can stop him he hurls the glass across the room.

He does not know until he’s done it that it’s the wrong thing to do. He did not mean to hurt anyone. He just really liked the deep-blue color of the glass, and how spinning the ice cubes made a whirlpool, and he likes to throw things that he likes, and he forgets that you’re not supposed to throw things inside, even magic glasses with whirlpools inside of them.

The glass hits the chair legs of a middle-aged white woman several tables away and shatters at her feet. She complains loudly and waves down a waiter dramatically, unnecessarily using all of her limbs.

She says, in full voice, standing up gingerly from her seat in distress, “That’s quite a shock that’s given me, quite a shock,” and she pointedly looks at Luna.

Luna knows the people around her don’t understand why she is not reprimanding her son. She knows they expect her to raise her voice, to grab him by the arm and pull him out of the room and scold him or make some other outward display of disappointment and horror on their behalf to demonstrate to their satisfaction that she will mete out the justice they surely would have expected and received when they were children. But Luna has never been one to do what other people want her to. And they don’t need to understand. Her husband is dead. How dare they look at her son, at her, like that.

She looks around at the other tables, for a moment, at other children with other mothers. Children focusing greedily on the food in front of them, children coloring the children’s menu quietly, children sitting on laps and eating pasta contentedly, older children reading books at the table while the adults talk. Dull, obedient children. She wonders where the other children are, the ones like hers. The other mothers, the ones like her. If there is a restaurant somewhere just for them, with holes in the walls and climbing equipment and mini-trampolines at each table where energetic, advanced, extraordinary children are applauded and are not stared at for throwing things from the sheer joy of being alive.

“Honestly, people should learn to control their children, that could have hit me in the head,” the older woman complains loudly to the waiter who arrives with the dustpan and brush for the glass.

Luna remains calm. She offers to pay for the broken glassware, she asks for their food to be packed up, and she pays for a gin and tonic to be sent to the woman’s table, not knowing that right at this moment she is trying to get her entire meal for free from the restaurant manager.

Luna apologizes to the many staff members involved in the cleanup. She apologizes to the diners at the next table. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

But Sonny feels the disapproving stares. He sees the unfriendly strangers looking at his mother. He wishes he hadn’t done it so these people would stop looking at her. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Sonny says, as tears flood his eyes.

“I know,” she says, “I know,” because they both know he doesn’t mean to do these things, but that he also can’t help it. She squeezes his hand, but she is distracted, trying to get their things to get them out of here.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Sonny says, pulling on her sleeve.

“Thank you,” she says to the waiter with the mop, as she bends to the floor with a napkin to try and assist. “Let me help.”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Sonny yells, clinging to her arm as she tries to help.

“I know, baby, I know,” she says, abandoning the napkin, hearing the crescendo in his voice that means they have to leave, now. She looks for the quickest way for them to exit, leaving the bags of food on the table, trying to take her beautiful boy away from all of the eyes looking at him, and from the eyes that are trying not to look.

The only way to leave is by walking past the woman’s table, and as they do she says, “Best of luck, you’ll need it, love, with that one. I’m afraid we all know where he’s headed,” and she clinks her fresh gin and tonic with her saggy dinner companion’s glass.

Luna ignores her, keeps walking, until she hears, “Doesn’t even bloody apologize,” and then she stops.

He’s perfect, he’s ours, she remembers.

And before she can stop herself, Luna says, “Why don’t you choke on a dough ball, bitch,” and as silence descends on the busy dinnertime rush, Luna feels good. She feels great, actually.

Flush with victory, she turns to usher Sonny out of the restaurant, her head held high, and she thinks how she can’t wait to go home and tell her husband all about it.

But when she reaches the door of the restaurant, she remembers that he’s gone.

How wonderful it was to forget that she has lost him for just a moment. How joyful, how mundane, how blissfully ordinary to feel the feeling of him, living, waiting at home for them, ready to hear her story.



* * *





Whenever she needs him after that, she calls on him and he speaks to her, especially when she needs his help with Sonny.

She has rarely said his name since he died, afraid of how the word echoes in the air without his big, hulking body in the world to absorb the sound, afraid of how his name—Graham—now refers to an absence. Instead, she calls him Babe, quietly to herself. It’s what they called each other, and that is easier to say somehow, because it was her name too.