The Round House by Louise Erdrich Page B

behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. But now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.
    It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we’d sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on. But now my mother flushed darkly and an almost imperceptible shudder coursed over her. She took a gasping breath, and put her hand to her wounded face. Then she stepped over the mess on the floor and walked carefully away. I wanted her to shout, cry out, throw something. Anything would have been better than the frozen suspension of feeling in which she mounted the stairs. She was wearing a plain blue dress that night. No stockings. A pair of black Minnetonka moccasins. As she walked up each riser she looked straight ahead and her hand was firm on the banister. Her steps were soundless. She seemed to float. My father and I had followed her to the doorway, and I think as we watched her we both had the sense that she was ascending to a place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved.
    W e stood together even after the bedroom door clicked shut. At last we turned and without a word we went back into the kitchen and scraped up the casserole and broken dish. Together we brought the mess outside to the garbage. My father paused after he closed the bin. He bowed his head and at that moment I was first aware that he exuded a desolation that would grip him with increasing force. When he remained there motionless, I truly became frightened. I put my hand urgently on his arm. I couldn’t say what I was feeling, but that time, at least, my father looked up.
    Help me get those files in. His voice was hard and urgent. We’ll start tonight.
    And so I did. We unloaded the car. Then we slapped together a few rough sandwiches. (He prepared one of the sandwiches with more care and put it on a plate. I cut up an apple, arranged the slices around the bread, meat, and lettuce. When my mother didn’t answer my tap on the bedroom door, I left it just outside.) Holding our food in our hands, we went into my father’s study and crammed our mouths as we frowned at the files. We brushed our crumbs to the floor. My father turned on the lamps. He settled himself at his desk and then nodded at me to do the same in the reading chair.
    He’s there, he said, nodding at the heavy stacks.
    I understood that I was going to help. My father was treating me as his assistant. He knew, of course, about my surreptitious reading. I glanced instinctively at the Cohen shelf. He nodded again, raised his eyebrows a fraction, and lip-pointed at the stack near my elbow. We began to read. And it was then that I began to understand who my father was, what he did every day, and what had been his life.
    Over the course of the next week, we culled several cases from the corpus of his work. During this time, which was the last week of school, my mother was unable to leave her room. My father brought her food. I sat with her in the evenings and read to her from The Family Album of Favorite Poems until she slept. It was an old maroon book with a ripped cover picturing happy white people reading poems in church, to their children at bedtime, whispering into a sweetheart’s ear. She would not let me read anything inspirational. I had to read the endless story poems with their ornate words and clunking rhythms. “Ben Bolt,” “The Highwayman,” “The Leak in the Dike,” and so on. As soon as her breathing evened out, I slunk away, relieved. She slept and slept, like she was sleeping for a sleeping marathon.