Read Online Instructions for the End of the World by Jamie Kain - Free Book Online Page B

that same unconscious grace I first noticed about her.
    I see that, at least in this way, as she stacks one piece of lumber on top of another—building a raised bed, maybe—she is like me. We are both building something. She is not afraid of toil and sweat and dirt.
    It would be wrong to stay here watching like a predator, when she is alone and going about her day. I should either go to her and offer to help with whatever it is she’s doing or leave.
    So I turn and head back into the woods, resisting the magnetic pull of her presence.
    Choosing solitude, because it’s safer.
    *   *   *
    We take the old Mercedes to town, its leather seats one of the more vivid memories of my childhood. My mother has always been a sketchy driver, so I insist on driving. Since it was my car during her absence, it should be a comfortable position—me in the driver’s seat—but I mostly kept it parked because I prefer my bike, and I feel as if I have a dangerous animal in the seat next to me. This is the first time I’ve been really alone with Annika for any length of time since she came back.
    It’s awkward, at best.
    I try to focus on the road while she tries to make up for a year in fifteen minutes, rambling on and on about her many revelations during therapy, most of which involve her feelings toward her mother, her anger at my father, her ambivalence about sobriety.
    She says it all like it’s a news flash, but I’ve heard it before. She’s a broken record of recovery and relapse, only this time she seems totally convinced it’s going to work.
    As if, at the age of forty-three, all her past habits have been erased.
    Maybe I sound bitter.
    That’s because I am.
    I sit through the AA meeting, and when Annika talks, introduces me, I realize she’s building a new identity. Responsible Annika. Cleaned Up Annika. Jesusy Annika.
    It makes me sick to my stomach, because it all feels like a lie she’s asking me to tell with her—even my presence is a part of the lie.
    Later we pull out of the lot of a low-slung community center that’s painted a color somewhere between beige and yellow, a cinder block construction of the sort that doesn’t even try to be anything but ugly.
    I notice these things because I love to think about the shapes and lines of structures, how form and function intertwine, the purpose of one style or another, the ways utility and beauty come together—or don’t, in this case.
    I feel as if the smells of old coffee and cigarette smoke from the meeting have permeated my very being, after an hour in that place.
    â€œSo tell me what’s been going on with you?” Annika asks me on the drive back home.
    I grip the steering wheel and stare straight ahead, my mind blank. I don’t think my mother has ever in her life before today wondered what’s going on with me. Again I think, Why now?
    It’s too late for mother-son bonding of this variety.
    I shrug. “Not much.”
    â€œYou’re gone from the house a lot. There must be something.”
    â€œJust doing deliveries, that’s all.… Why do you care?” I say, perversely not wanting to tell her what she hopes to hear.
    â€œI just want a better life for you than I had.”
    Which is a joke. She had a great childhood, with loving parents who gave her every advantage.
    â€œMaybe you should have thought of that seventeen years ago,” I say before I can stop myself.
    For a few silent moments, the accusation hangs in the air between us. I don’t look at her, don’t want to see how she feels about it.
    â€œYou’re angry with me,” she finally says.
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œI understand. You have the right to be angry. I just hope you can move past it and have some compassion eventually as well.”
    I roll a bitter response around on my tongue, weighing it, daring myself to say more, but I don’t. I know she likes