The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb Page B

back in? They’re going crazy out there.”
    Mo shook her head. “She’s really scared of them.”
    We ended things a little after nine. Mo stayed home to clean up and I drove Velvet back, the balloons bobbing and blocking my view from the rearview mirror. En route, I asked her if she’d had a good time.
    “Yeah,” she said. “You and Mom are awesome.”
    “Why do you call her Mom?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. Cuz she’s my mom.”
    “Yeah? How so?”
    She didn’t answer for several seconds. Then, she said, “I’ll give you a blow job if you want. I’m good at it.” At first, I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t think of anything
to
say. “You know the Salvation Army store? Just drive around back where the drop-off bins are.”
    “Velvet,” I said. “That’s so inappropriate, so disrespectful of … How can you spend the evening with us, call her
Mom,
for Christ’s sake, and then—”
    “Okay, okay,” she snapped. “You don’t have to get all moral about it. It’s not like you’re doing
me
any favors.”
    When I stopped for a red light, she swung the door open and jumped out. “Hey, come back here!” I called.
    She did, but only to snatch up her gifts, minus the balloon bouquet. I followed her for about a block, trying to coax her back into the car. It was dark. It was late. We were a mile or more from where she lived. “Get away from me, you perv!” she screamed. Hey, I didn’t need
that
bullshit. I hung a U-turn and gunned it in the opposite direction.
    I didn’t get it. She’d enjoyed the evening. Why did she have to sabotage it? I was sure her come-on was going to piss off Maureen as much as it did me.
    Except when I got home, I didn’t tell Mo. “That was quick,” she said.
    “Yeah. No traffic. The dogs need to go out?”
    “Just came back in. I see she forgot her balloons.”
    “That’s a red flag, isn’t it?” I said. “That ‘Mom’ business?”
    “Well, I’m not going to make an issue of it, Caelum. If she wants to call me Mom, what’s the big deal?”
    I let go of Velvet’s bouquet. It rose and bumped the ceiling.
    The next morning, the balloons were floating halfway between the ceiling and the floor. By the time Aunt Lolly called for her Sunday check-in, they were grazing the carpet. You moved, they moved; they were like wraiths. I kept losing track of what Lolly was saying. Kept wondering why I’d let the whole day slip by without telling Mo what Velvet had said. Which of the two was I trying to protect? Or was it myself I needed to shield from Velvet’s sleazy offer? … “You know what Shirley Pingalore told me the other day?” Lolly was saying. “That they had to cancel the sports program because of overcrowding. They’re using the gym as a dormitory. Seventy-five beds and two toilets. It’s pathetic.” I opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed a steak knife.
    “What’s that?” Lolly said.
    “What?”
    “Sounds like gunfire.”
----
    AT SCHOOL ON MONDAY, VELVET was a no-show. She was MIA for the rest of that week. I kept meaning to say something to Maureen, but then I kept not doing it. I didn’t want to say anything to Ivy Shapiro, either—have
her
start playing twenty questions. Velvet’s proposition had come so out of nowhere, and had been so goddamned embarrassing, I decided to just bury it.
    She resurfaced the following week, but when I went to pick her up for our noontime discussion, she told me she didn’t want to meet with me anymore—that she was sick of it. Mrs. Jett had left the room to get some tea, and the other kids had been dismissed to lunch.
    “You’re sick of it, or you feel ashamed about what you said during that ride home?” I said. “Because if it’s that, then—”
    “What’d I say?” she asked. “I don’t even remember.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    She told me she wanted to read what
she
wanted to read, not the boring crap I gave her. Writing was boring, she said.
I
was boring. She’d just written all that corny