Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner Page A

animals like Bobby, and Bob Ross loves everybody in Amer­ica. And he’s been dead for ten years.”
    â€œLet me tell you something, Bobby. I don’t care if he’s dead. Bob Ross is a cunt. He’s a rich, pandering, talentless hack cunt.”
    Nobody wanted to hear him say that word again, so they all went back to watching the show in chastened silence, but after that day making fun of Bob Ross seemed to have lost some of its luster, and they’d stopped watching the show
en famille
.
    Bob Ross was putting the finishing touches on his landscape, using a palette knife to scrape a layer of snow down the mountainside. Wes’s mother took his hand in hers. It was always a defining moment of any show when Bob Ross applied the snow; with nothing but a knife, some white paint and a few spare sweeps of his hand, he brought the entire composition into three dimensions, creating boulders and crevasses and shadows and arcing slopes where a moment earlier there had been nothing but flat planes of color. His father was right—it was sleight of hand, nothing more—but irresistible for all that. Wes could definitely sympathize with anyone who’d rather watch and listen to Bob Ross than deal with reality. Wes’s mother squeezed his hand, and he looked down at her and smiled warmly.
    â€œPudding.”
    â€œOh yeah. Be right back.”
    Nora was in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator and peeling the plastic off a mozzarella stick. She was wearing the stringy blue wig that they had bought Crispy for Halloween, but which had made Crispy look so reduced and defeated that no one had been able to bear seeing her in it. Nora smiled at Wes shyly, to which he responded with a deliberate glare, and the smile vanished. Unlike the other rooms of the house that faced the back, the kitchen had no curtains or blinds on the window, and the light from the yard, with no leaves on the tree to filter it, was unpleasantly bright and yet dead and thin at the same time. Wes pushed past Nora and slid the lower sash open with casual brutality.
    â€œIt’s too hot in here.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter?”
    â€œNothing’s the matter. Where’s Crisp?”
    â€œI think she’s with dad. What’s wrong?”
    â€œYou sure you walked her?”
    â€œI didn’t walk her. You asked, and I told you I didn’t walk her.”
    â€œAnything else you didn’t do?”
    â€œWhat didn’t I do?”
    â€œMom’s pudding? Like you said? Is it too fucking much around here to . . . ? Oh, fuck it. Just give me a fucking pudding. I’ll do it.”
    Nora was already crying copiously by the time she reached the sink, her eyebrows reddening as the wig slipped partially down one side of her head. She reached into the sink.
    â€œI
did
give it to her. Here’s the spoon, see? Here’s the cup, see? I told you.” She held up a dirty spoon, a few grains of white rice and a film of dried cream still clinging to it. “See? See? See?”
    Wes’s anger instantly collapsed in on itself. Nora always looked five years younger when she cried; even as a helpless baby, her eyebrows had reddened just like that when Wes startled her with a sudden noise, such as deliberately dropping a fork on the metal tray of her high chair or sneaking up and clapping his hands just behind her head of silky blonde curls. What was worse, he knew that the moment he offered her words of regret and a gesture of comfort, she would accept it gratefully, without hesitation, and with all her great heart, as she had done as a baby. This was now twice in one day—in one morning—that he had made her cry, and the second time he had had to take her in his arms to staunch her tears. She was a better person than Wes would ever be, but he wasn’t sure how many more times he could get away with it before it stopped working.
    â€œShe told me you didn’t, Cookie.