"M. Rickert - Anyway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

"Would you like to talk to the social worker?"

I shake my head, tap the counter with my fingertips before I wave, breezy,
unconcerned.

Once outside I look at my watch. I still have to get the groceries for tomorrow's
dinner. It's my father's birthday and he wants, of all things, pot roast. Luckily, my
son, Robbie, has agreed to cook it. I've been a vegetarian for eighteen years and
now I have to go buy a pot roast.

"What if you could save the world?" I remember my mother asking the question, so
clearly, as if she were really presentтАФin her skin and in her mindтАФin a way she
hasn't been for years.

"Mom," I say, as I unlock the car door, "I can't even save this cow."

That's when I realize that a man I've seen inside the home, but who I don't know by
name, stands between my car and his (I assume). He stares at me for a moment
and then, with a polite smile, turns away.

I start to speak, to offer some explanation for what he's overheard, but he is
walking away from me, toward the nursing home, his shoulders hunched as if under
a weight, or walking against a wind, though it is early autumn and the weather is
mild.

On Sunday, my dad and Robbie sit in the kitchen drinking beer while the pot roast
cooks, talking about war. I have pleaded with my father for years not to talk to
Robbie this way, but he has always dismissed my concerns. "This is men talk," he'd
say, elbowing Robbie in the ribs, tousling his hair while Robbie, gap-toothed and
freckled and so obviously not a man, grinned up at me. But now Robbie is nineteen.
He drinks a beer and rubs his long fingers over the stubble of his chin. "Don't get me
wrong," my dad says, "it's a terrible thing, okay? There's mud and snakes and bugs,
and we didn't take a shower for three months." He glances at me and nods. I know
that this is meant as a gesture on his part, a sort of offering to me and my peacenik
ways.

The smell of pot roast drives me from the kitchen to the backyard. It's cooler today
than yesterday, and the sky has a grayish cast. Most of the leaves have fallen, the
yard littered with the muted red, gold, and green. I sit on the back step. "Didn't take
a shower for three months," my father says again, loudly. I hear him through the
kitchen windows that I had cracked open, trying to alleviate the odor of cooked
meat.

I listen to the murmur of Robbie's voice.

"Oh, but it was a beautiful thing," my dad says. "It was the right thing to do. Nobody
questioned it back then. We were saving the world."

For dessert we have birthday cake, naturally. My dad's favorite, chocolate with