Byron opens the freezer to put the remaining coffee beans inside and sees a disk-like form wrapped in tin foil. There it is. The black cake. He reaches out and touches it. I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right, his mother wrote in her note. You’ll know when, she said. Now he understands the when.
Anonymity
Benny opens her suitcase and pulls out her silver-gray sweater. She refuses to wear all black to her mother’s funeral tomorrow. She flaps open the sweater and hangs it over her old desk chair. She hadn’t planned on being here in her old bedroom. She’s never slept in her childhood home without her parents.
Benny had thought that staying in a neutral place tonight would have been easier. She has always found comfort in the anonymity of travel, in the no-man’s-land of vast airport lounges, the plastic smell of rental cars, the hotel key cards that wiped your identity clean on checkout. All those spaces free of emotional weight. But this time, it was different.
Benny had booked a hotel for her stay here in Orange County, but when she found herself lying in a standard-double room so close to her childhood home, it filled her with a sadness that went beyond the death of her mother, a downward draft that pulled at her when she touched the brushed chrome faucets in the bathroom, the dimmers in the bedroom, the tiny tubes of fake cream beside the coffee machine.
The room was spacious and clean and carpet-quiet, just the way she needed it to be after a cross-country flight, but it was only three miles from the house. When Byron told her to stay over, Benny didn’t think she would. Byron wasn’t even talking to her, except for covering the obligatory comments. Keys, coffee, cremation. But after listening to the first part of her mother’s recording, after saying good night to Mr. Mitch, she looked at her father’s armchair and knew that she couldn’t bear to go back to the hotel. Of course, she must have known it would be this way. She had, after all, brought her suitcase to the house with her.
Depth
Byron’s phone is vibrating against the kitchen counter. He’s forgotten about this morning’s appointment at the hair stylist’s. Haircut, no color. He doesn’t mind that bit of gray at his temples, but his hair guy warns him he might want to consider keeping it to a minimum, for a while yet. Byron cancels the appointment, there isn’t enough time, though he knows his mother wouldn’t have skipped it. His ma would not have gone to a funeral without having her hair done first.
His mother would have said it was a sign of respect to do her hair, to check the condition of her clothes, to see if she needed to buy a new shirt. She really was quite conventional in some ways, though, as Byron has come to see, in fewer ways than he’d imagined. But one of his mother’s mantras when he and Benny were kids was Dress with respect! That had never changed.
When Byron first got into his profession, he couldn’t have imagined seeing his male colleagues with manicured eyebrows and the women with hair extensions. Times change, and people should feel free to primp and tweak with the trends. He just never thought it would become a professional necessity for geologists, engineers, and mathematicians to be Instagram-ready on any given day of the week. This was more than respect, this was showmanship.
Byron supposes he should be grateful for the social media, the signs that so many people are into the work that he does. He certainly continues to be intrigued by his own profession. With the sonar technology they have now, his team can amass thousands of square kilometers’ worth of high-resolution maps from just one deep-sea expedition. On some days, Byron just laughs out loud at the beauty of it all.
Byron believes that a lot of the people who follow him online really do get how important underwater mapping is, that it isn’t just about technology and being able to see the shape of the land below the seas. It’s about weather patterns, tsunamis, territorial defenses, fisheries, Internet cabling, tracking pollution, and so much more. It’s about how we will live in the future. And, of course, it’s about money. Always, the money.
Byron lies in bed some mornings staring at the ceiling for a long while, wondering how much of his work is doing good and how much is only opening the gates to profit seekers who will use the information to do things like mine previously uncharted areas of the seabed for precious metals, rare elements, oil, and other riches. Much of which, he knows, benefits his own lifestyle.
People talk about responsible management of natural resources, they talk about sustainability and moderation, but Byron hasn’t seen a whole lot of these things in the twenty-something years of his career. He thought that by doing his work well, engaging the public, aiming for the director’s position, he would have done some good. But now that both of his parents are gone, he doesn’t know anymore if his life has really made that much of a difference to anyone or anything.