Danger, Sweetheart by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

are you so upset when the problem was easily solved? Why am I overnighting in the world’s oddest bed-and-breakfast?
    â€œYes. They. Are! ” She whirled on him so quickly, Blake experienced a sympathy dizzy spell. “That’s the whole point . That’s what you don’t get .”
    Dear God. More italics talk. Not good, most emphatically not good. It forced him to say three words he loathed, words he tried never to say aloud if he could help it, a bad habit that had led to much unpleasantness: “I don’t understand.”
    â€œNo. You don’t; that’s clear to me like it never was before. That’s on me, too. But you will, boy. I promise.”
    â€œAll right.” Blake pitted every shred of self-control into not sounding terrified. “Enlighten me, if you please. I’m all yours. Here, I’ll…” He looked around, spotted nothing to sit on that wasn’t embroidered, topped, or near flowers, and sank into the overstuffed chair near the fireplace.
    â€œNow you listen like your life depends on it, Blake.” Unspoken: because it does. “What you’ve done in your Martian arrogance is … is…” His mother was trailing off in confusion (he could count the number of times that happened on both hands) and staring into space.
    â€œMother?” She was too young for Alzheimer’s, he thought in a panic. Wait; was she?
    â€œOh!” she gasped, slapping herself on the forehead like a gothic heroine. “I promised Roger I’d help him deworm the White Rose of York!”
    Blake stared up at her from the chair that was making a valiant effort to suck him in. If there was such a thing as flower quicksand, this chair was the physical manifestation of such an entity . “You promised who? To do what?”
    â€œDeworm the White Rose of York. She’s a pig,” his mother added impatiently, clearly irritated with Blake’s continual stupidity.
    Blake began to give serious thought to the theory that the train had crashed, that he was even now in a canyon somewhere with train cars piled everywhere, slowly bleeding out. All of this … whatever it was … it was just a hallucination conjured by his dying brain to divert him from the fact of his own death.
    â€œMom, I don’t—”
    â€œTo be continued!” she snapped, jabbing a bony finger in the general vicinity of his face before sweeping out the door. “We are not done !” she italicized, her voice getting farther away with every stomp. She didn’t slam the door—Shannah Tarbell would never indulge in such childish behavior, no matter how tempting—but the weight of her displeasure was much worse.
    Blake, never a fan of casual profanity (everyone does it; there are so many more interesting ways to express shock/anger/surprise/sadness; how dull), managed a, “What the fuck ?” before allowing the chair to suck him the rest of the way in. If he was lucky, it would suffocate him.

 
    Seven
    The terms, the hideous impossible terms of his withdrawal from disgrace and reinstatement into his mother’s affections, were made horrifyingly clear over dinner that evening.
    Blake, suspecting nothing, arrived five minutes early. Used to the teeming masses of the greater Las Vegas area, he had overestimated the time to traverse from UR A Sweetheart! (God, that exclamation point unnerved him) to the (why? why? ) Dipsy Diner.
    He had parked the Supertruck at one end of the neatly kept downtown area and, as he walked the streets, he began to get an inkling of what had so disturbed his mother.
    Everything was dead, or dying.
    Not the few people he saw; they were lively enough, if quiet, keeping their distance and watching him pass with wide-eyed curiosity. Small towns, he told himself, surprised he wasn’t made uneasy by the scrutiny, and strangers stand out. Is my mother a stranger to them? I think yes. I think she was even