Monday's Lie by Jamie Mason

being followed, it was just a by-product of my mother’s instruction. I’ve always worn the vigilance she taught us as nerves. She wore it as custom-fitted armor.
    I check the clock, then the mirror again. I’m making good time and there’s nothing behind me but a long tail of gray road stretched to the horizon, empty. If I’m paranoid, I’ve come by it honestly.
    She had worked on us so that she would feel we were safe, but also in hopes that we would have bigger lives. She thought those who, given the same amount of time, didn’t dissect the moments as they sped past were doomed to a hazy picture of the world, a plain and normal sketch of it. But take a microscope to your small, diffuse view and suddenly a sharp vastness was yours—even in the middle of a parking lot or on the end of a lonely pier on the margin of a lake.
    But her magic spells had side effects. She knew that. When Patrick and I had just moved out of our newlywed apartment, bureaucratically now all grown up with a mortgage that would chain us to fifty-five-hour workweeks for the foreseeable future, my mother brought me flowers from her garden and warned me of recruitment.
    â€œDon’t be surprised if Paul tries to get you to come work for him one day,” she’d said. “He’s got his eye on you because of this crazy idea he has that there’s some sort of premium pedigree for his shenanigans. He thinks that since he was looking for my uncle when he found me, it somehow works around, in his mind anyway, to believing that it’s in the blood.”
    Paul had already approached me twice, once directly and once obliquely, but I’d ignored him both times all the way down to not even mentioning it to my mother.
    â€œNah, he wouldn’t want me,” I said. “I’m no good with languages.”
    She studied me with a tight smile. “Right. Though I don’t recall you ever studying a language.”
    â€œI took Latin.” I busied myself with straightening the salt and pepper shakers against the napkin holder.
    â€œRight,” she said again. “Latin.”
    â€œBesides, are you saying that I shouldn’t follow in your footsteps? What’s wrong with working for Paul? It seems to pay nicely, and no matter what happened, you were never in a serious hurry to leave it all behind.” I risked a quick look up to see if the conversation was still on the lighter side.
    â€œPaul and I had a deal. After the Long Trip, I said I’d stay and I stayed. High jinks ensued,” she said with an admirably straight face. “Anyway, all I’m saying is that if you ever do go that way, don’t let them make you think it was your idea if it wasn’t. That you will resent. But don’t ask me how I know that. Anyway, I suppose there’s still plenty of time for you to learn some undead languages if you wanted to.” She winked at me.
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    Our little Vess cabal had always danced over and around the notion of marital commitment. My mother enjoyed male companionship, always presenting it as a positive thing without confusing the issue by defining it as a necessary pillar of permanence in our lives. She dissolved her every partnership over the years with firm kindness, until Simon and I learned not to attach more than mild friendship to each carefully vetted man who came and would eventually go.
    She teased us, and her suitors, that she could never get married again, obviously, since her left hand was down by two fingers and there wasn’t any place to hang a ring. My resolve to persist with Patrick felt almost secessionist in my family’s established patterns. Mother didn’t. Simon didn’t. Then I went and did.
    I’d thought of it as a character flaw in her, a rare inability. I saw it, like her hand, as a forgivable deformity through some injury that maybe our father had dealt her. I wondered if perhaps in her