Pictures of You: Paul Myette

“The Willows,” by  Paul Myette

 

His parents bought him a popcorn ball to show him that everything was fine, to keep him from asking if everything was fine. It worked. For a while it worked. They smiled and said of course, of course as they handed it to him. He knew better. He saw the frustration in his father’s face, the hurt in his mother’s, but they only bought him treats on the days when they were good. The popcorn ball, brown with caramel, dotted with peanuts, allowed him to accept their fiction.

He struggled with it. He sat on a bench and tried to eat. The circumference was too much for his mouth, but he bit at it over and again, struggling to gain purchase with his bottom teeth. He thought if he could pull even one kernel free from the rest then he could take it from there. The process coated his chin with a layer of caramel. Every third bite or so he’d stop and lick this, pushing his tongue as far down past his lip as he could. His hands grew sticky beyond cleaning.

His parents moved a few paces away into the shade of one of the willow trees. Out of the corner of his eye he could still see the familiar signs of argument. His father threw his hands in the air. His mother studied something on her shoe, or perhaps in the dirt just beside it. At home these gestures came with yelling. His father always started loud, his mother soft. On the bad days she forgot to shush him, forgot to remind him that they could be heard. On bad days her volume rose to match his. Here in the park, in the fragile pretense of a peaceful Sunday afternoon, they both kept their voices low.

He pried a chunk of the popcorn ball loose from the rest. Before he could take it in it fell from his mouth and landed in the sandy divot beneath the bench. He stared at it. For a long second he looked and felt the sense of loss one feels when hard work goes for naught. Then he looked at his popcorn ball and saw the crater the chunk had left. It was enough. He bit at the edge, careful not to lose it this time, and he tasted the salt and the sweet together and forgot about the piece on the ground. The ants came to it and he didn’t notice.

He ate his popcorn ball. The crowds streamed past in a parade of summer ecstasy. In twos and threes they broke off to go into the arcades for skee ball or into the beer garden. Some walked down to the waters edge and rented a canoe. The lucky few made their way to the amusement rides. Through it all wafted the smell of fried food, the music from the rides and the cries of the gulls, beating their wings at each other in the effort to win a dropped onion ring. Part of him registered all of this but his focus remained with the popcorn ball. As long as he had that nothing was wrong.

Fine.

His father’s yell broke the silence. Some of the passersby stopped and looked. His father turned and walked off.

He kept his teeth on the popcorn ball as he watched his father disappear into the crowds of the beer garden. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother hunched over. He thought to go to her and put his arm around her. That was what she did for him when he skinned a knee. As he thought about it he tasted the popcorn ball in his mouth and he knew, without understanding, that to comfort her was to drop the fiction. He couldn’t do that. He chewed slowly. She stood slowly, walked to him and sat beside him on the bench.

Fifteen minutes passed. Thirty. His father didn’t emerge from the beer garden.

He offered the last bite of the popcorn ball to his mother. She shook her head and gave him a wan smile. He offered it again, then finally finished it himself. He looked at her, uncertain what to do next. His mother stood and took him by the hand, not caring that it was sticky. She led him to the amusement rides. They had come every Sunday to walk in the Willows. She had never taken him to the amusement rides before. She gave him his choice and he pointed to the helicopters. He’d seen the kids riding in those, pulling on the handle to raise them into the air. They went round and round, pulling on that handle, flying like real pilots and waving to their parents leaned up against the white aluminum fence.

They stood in line and when they reached the front the man asked for fifty cents. She fished in her purse and came up with a quarter, a dime and a nickel. Her head drooped and then came up offering the man forty cents and a pleading look.

The man nodded his head.

He climbed onto his helicopter. His mother moved to the edge of the fence.

The ride began and he pulled on the stick. His helicopter rose. It soared. As he came around he saw his mother wave and he lowered the helicopter so that he could wave back.

Every time around he did this. Every time around, as he guided the machine back into the air he would look out toward the beer garden hoping to catch a glimpse of his father coming out to say that everything was fine.

 

***

Paul Myette’s fiction has appeared in the Elm Leaves Journal and Apt Literary Magazine and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English, Paul is currently at work on his first novel. He lives with his wife and children in Byfield, MA where he shares his writing space with several aggressive squirrels.