“Don’t worry about cleaning up here,” Ryan says in a tone carefully balanced between magnanimity and sarcasm. This exquisite balance is a symptom of having had a younger sister for some years now and desiring to fill his own occasional need for sarcasm, to keep his sister from completely getting it, and to keep his mother from hearing potential complaints from Emily. “I’ve got this,” he adds.
Emily has gotten his sarcasm for some time now, but chooses to play along. Why not? “Okay then,” she smiles up at him, then flips the channel to a promising looking program with lots of puppies.
Ryan deposits all of the breakfast pieces in their appropriate locations—cabinet, dishwasher, trash—and turns down the hall to his room. On a whim, he changes into shorts, t-shirt, and sneakers.
He leans into his mom’s office, but she’s not working in there. She’s not in bed, either. The light is on in her half-bathroom, though, and that’s where he finds her. She’s scrubbing the toilet. Big times.
“I’m going for a run,” Ryan tells her.
She looks up. “Oh yeah? A run?”
“Yeah.” It sounds really cool, so he says it again. “I’m going for a run.”
“It’s almost noon, right?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“’Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun,’ you know.”
“Yeah, well, I think I should be okay.” Ryan’s used to his mother pulling quotes out of the air like this. It sometimes gets to the point where he’s not sure if she’s saying something original or taken from elsewhere. In this case, it doesn’t really matter to him.
“Well, fine then, runner man.” She smiles at him. “Do you think you should be able to make it back within half an hour?”
“Maybe,” he says. “I’ll see you then.”
“Go to town, baby,” she says, and returns to scrubbing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment