JEANETTE PAUL WORE a point-hemmed black smock top and black stretch pants. She clickety-clicked auburn-painted nails on the fake stick shift. She recognized her beast of an emotion through the behavior of other drivers. After getting on the New Jersey Turnpike, she was thrown into a nervous rage by the flashy lane-changing of drug dealers or party-bound off-duty lawyers or whoever they were, speeding toward the Holland Tunnel and Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon. She slowed on purpose, forcing faster cars to pass. Annoyed heads turned when they passed her. Her dog-in-the-manger pokiness didn’t seem to fit with the character of her car, which was black with a large spoiler and a huge red bird of prey painted on the hood.
Jeanette could make out the jets lined up to land at Newark. Loosely strung diamonds, they wavered in the hot air sheeting from below. The queue shelved north and ever higher over a ground-hugging pumpkin haze. Only the closest diamonds were visibly jets, ghostly except for their quavering lights, which became double, quadruple as they neared. They seemed too tiny and transitory to be carrying passengers inside, passengers craning their necks, nervously flexing their thighs at the jolting of screw gears, chewing gum, putting sneakers back on, wishing they’d peed. Least of all could Jeanette connect her son, Barry, to one of these serene celestial flickers. As he had last time, Barry would hitch up his yokel backpack and come clomping out of the gate as if popping out of immateriality. No drama of absence. Simply expecting her to be there as if this was the first day of kindergarten. No awareness that she may have wanted to get picked up at the airport herself once or twice during the years he’d been out West.
She argued this way in her mind for the sake of argument, because in truth, she didn’t want Barry returning at all just now. She didn’t make that point, however. Even in her own mind, she didn’t want to sound like an unworthy mother.
Making an effort to put herself in a better frame of mind, she allowed she was curious to see what Barry looked like since the last time, almost three years ago. Her own look had changed recently. Her hair was cropped in a cresting brush that trailed down the nape of her neck—shades of “glam punk” her hairdresser had—she hoped—joked. And she’d let her hair color evolve from blonde toward ash.
The vast terminal was teeming, but Jeanette’s eyes were drawn to her son at once. He couldn’t have been on any of the planes she’d seen. He’d been waiting here for a while, feet propped up on the same grubby yellow backpack he’d had three years ago. The sudden meeting, almost involuntary, made gates and flight numbers and arrival times look like over-cautious protocols. Fate got the job done with a shrug. A good thing, too, since Jeanette had obviously gotten the arrival time wrong.
Barry wore a green knit skull cap and a choker of what looked, to Jeanette, like a lizard’s vertebrae. He made an easy-going karate chop of a wave. His feet rose, and he bucked out of the chair. Their facial muscles tweaked uncertainly.
“What’s this look?” Jeanette asked, annoyed by her nerves.
“Me?”
“Yeah, yeah, all this,” her hand butterflied around him—old, tissue paper T-shirt, the choker, the skull cap.
“I don’t know. Just clothes. A look.” He shrugged, smiling, looking at her just as intently.
She noticed unclean pores, a messy smattering of whiskers, a few fine wrinkles already. “Do you have any hair under that?” she demanded.
“Nope.” He tipped it up for her to see the stubble.
“Well, I guess I know why you did that. Afraid I was going to drag you off to Philippe first thing.” Philippe was her old colorist. “I’m sure everything I did when you were a kid traumatized you. Anyway, Hello.” She hugged him gingerly.
“I haven’t had hair for a long time. Yours looks good, though. Sort of a wild look for you. Like Bowie.”
Jeanette clasped her hands tightly to keep herself from touching the ash blonde brush in self-consciousness. “Mm,” she said, instead of Thank you.
The car made Barry laugh. “Very wild, Mom! I’m impressed. You’re driving a Firebird. You’re going to end up turning into a biker chick, I bet.”
She had to laugh with him. “It’s what they had. Some kid was in love with it and couldn’t get the money together. For me, it was cheap. I figure I saved his life.”
“Can I drive it?”
“No, you can’t. Ever heard of insurance?”
He could tell she was nervous, because she launched into her plans right away. She warned him the house was a mess. She hadn’t had time to make up his old room. Even the bed had been disassembled. They could stop now for a quick bite, but as far as dinner was concerned, he was on his own. She was busy with something that evening. Neither of them mentioned Lynn. They’d get to that later.
The conversation stalled. Jeanette was going to mention the heat, abating that day, but the weather cliché felt too pathetic. “Is this some ghetto Muslim thing you’re into with the no hair and the hat?” she asked instead.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way.” He’d taken an old tobacco pouch from his pocket. He stripped a rubber band from it, which he cat’s-cradled on one hand. Dirty nails. He opened the pouch on his lap. His forefinger nuzzled what appeared to be twigs and trinkets inside. He removed something from the collection and palmed it. He plucked out his dog-eared boarding pass and tossed it on the dashboard. He gave the bag of baubles another stir before double-banding it again. His monkey-like self-preoccupation irritated Jeanette, but she forced herself not to ask what he was doing.
Furthermore, Jeanette noticed that she didn’t want to hear what Barry was doing in a larger sense—girlfriend, place of residence, job, if any, travel. She had to wonder if that was envy, a despicable thing in a mother. But how could she take pride in a life she was hardly allowed into?
They pulled off the highway at the Cheesequake rest stop for a quick bite. “You mind?” Barry dangled his tobacco pouch after they got out of the car. With ill grace, Jeanette opened the trunk so he could secrete the bag in his yellow backpack.
The trunk thudded shut. “Barry!”
He cocked his head at the sighing pulse of traffic or at the hot murmur of insects. He had a beatific grunginess about him. “Weird to be back here again,” he commented. Over the years he’d started to sound a little Western. He spoke with a snowboarder’s drawl, childish, enunciation whispery, the quizzical vowels prolonged.
“Barry!” Jeanette repeated. “I can’t stand your belt that way. Could you possibly change it? And yes, I know this place is awful. For a nature boy like you.” She flipped her hand at the characterless Cheesequake rest stop and parking lots. In a burst of resentment, she narrowed her eyes. “And don’t think I’m some suburban New Jersey vulgarian. I know what this place is like. It’s just easy.”
“This is fine.”
Jeanette looked around her sourly as if the place really wasn’t fine. Not at all. It goes without saying the rest stop looked poorly maintained and cheap. Jeanette felt she was staring at the manipulative corporate mind behind it all, not at the blah design or the décor. The sickly landscaping had an air of stinginess and inattention.
Barry wasn’t sensitive in the same way. He indulged his mother patiently. “What’s wrong with my belt?”
“Barry, you’ve got it threaded under the label thingy, and you missed a loop, too. But mainly I hate that look—the belt running under the Levi’s label. It’s nerdy.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Maybe you could take it off and do it right.”
“Here?” He shrugged. He unbuckled the belt and whipped it off. Butt turned toward Jeanette so she could supervise, he put the belt back on.
“Thank you, thank you,” she said, greatly relieved. As they entered the rest stop, she muttered, “When I used to be in charge of dressing you, you always looked so nice and neat. But I got palpitations every time we stopped here and you wanted to pee—because of all the fags loitering outside the—my God, they’re still here!”
Booth-like fast food outlets and souvenir shops encircled a pen of tables. A colossal chattering and clinking and cash register noise filled the space. Jeanette and Barry carried trays to the one empty table. Even Barry felt a little defeated by mass marketing. Jeanette told her son that eating fast food always made her fall asleep, so if she dozed and crashed and died and he was left crippled, she wanted to be sure he sued Burger King.
“All right, let’s get something straight,” she began a little later, looking past Barry’s shoulder, still shaking her head at the hoi polloi, at America. “You don’t really know the situation here. You fly in, and I’m sure you’re thinking I’m not giving dear old dad all the loving kindness he deserves as he fades into the sunset. It’s a cute way of thinking about it, but it’s not what’s going on. Lynn—which people never, ever, see—is a true prick. He’s always been more like a cat than a husband. He sits in the sun doing not a thing and God only knows what’s on his mind. That was even before he turned into a drunk. And now that he’s quit drinking, it’s even worse, believe it or not.” She turned over the cunning cardboard “large fries” sleeve in one hand, wondering at the design super-mind behind it. “I mean, I don’t even know why you bothered to come. It’s not like now is a particularly dire moment. Although—” She smiled. “You know, I do know why. I bet you think I wouldn’t tell you when the time came. But that’s your own fault. If I had a sure way of getting in touch with you. As it is, at present, I’m worried you’re going to get in the way more than anything.”
“I wanted to see him. Spend a little time with him.”
“What was it, three years ago?—you were here for two weeks, then poof!” Her auburn nails flicked at several unused, double-barreled salt packets. One of them skated off the table into Barry’s lap.
Putting the salt packet back on the table, he said, “We weren’t getting along.”
Jeanette noticed that Barry had placed a lustrous black pebble on the table. This was the object he’d taken from his tobacco pouch. She looked at it a moment, making no comment. Then she said, “You can’t just hang around the house. I promise you, it’s not me. It’s him. He likes it to be as quiet as the grave. He’s got this perfectly deadly routine. Anything upsets it, and he starts to whine to me. Which he always has, but it’s much worse. You never got that. No one did except me. I was always the garbage bin for his self-pity. I almost wish he would start drinking again.”
“Mom. But I’ll help.”
“Right. Right. Whatever. All right. How long were you thinking of staying?”
“A long time this time. Right through. Probably as long as—you know. That’s what I thought.”
“Yeah, that’s what you were threatening when you called. But, you know, you’re going to have to find a place. And a job, too. There’s absolutely no money.”
“OK,” he said.
He said it so readily she snorted. “You have no idea.”
“Maybe it could be cool for you too, Mom. Think of that? Like, lighten the load.”
“Yeah, that would be cool. Twenty years ago, it would be cool. The thing I can’t figure out is what the hell you’re going to do. Job-wise.”
“I can always find something. Tree surgeon.”
She laughed and mouthed, “You idiot,” and he grinned back at her.
“You’ll see. You’ll be happy somebody’s around,” he said. “I can tell you haven’t talked to anybody all day. You don’t probably talk to anybody ever.”
“There, you’re wrong. I do happen to have somebody. I know I need support—of course I do—and I’ve found it.”
“A guy?” Barry asked matter-of-factly.
The question made Jeanette pause. Not for the reason you’d expect. She suppressed her instantaneous reaction in order to think for a moment. She appeared to be weighing Yes and No as answers, regardless of which one was true—the way a storyteller might. But she also wondered whether Barry’s question was just condescending twenty-six-year-old flattery, as if she couldn’t really find a man. Less scornfully than she might have, she said, “No. It’s not a man. It’s sort of a group. But I’d rather not get into it right away.”
“OK. Sounds cool, though.”
During this exchange, Jeanette had been fussing with the garbage on the table. Aligning the diminutive orange trays, unsticking the paper placemats glued to the trays with blots of Coke, riffling a wad of napkins, feeding a spiral of drinking straw wrapper into a crispy chicken sandwich clamshell. Mainly she seemed to be adjusting things so she could jostle the black pebble without it appearing obvious. Moving the clamshell caused the pebble to wobble. Yanking the stuck placemat caused it to revolve once. The pebble then disappeared entirely under the wad of napkins. It reappeared, wobbling, when Barry took the napkins off and stuffed them into an empty bag. “Is there anything I should particularly know?” he wondered. “Special news or—or information?”
“What about?”
“About Dad.”
“What do you mean? About his medical condition? What’s there to know? He’s got cancer. You might stick a finger up your own butt when the time comes.”
“That’s not what I meant. More like results and—prognosis and stuff. I guess you’re right. I don’t know how this works. It just makes me sad.”
“Hmmmm,” Jeanette vocalized. The humming was meant to obliterate Barry’s too-naked remark. Eyes screwed almost closed at the pebble, lips compressed like a twist of candy wrapper, she said, “Of course, it is sad. But it’s not romantic sad like you’re probably thinking. That’s a very common mistake. People are actually mean and disgraceful and badly behaved when they’re, you know, near the end. What I should really do—” By a subtle degree her tone became lighter. “What I should really do is poison him. Don’t you think? I fix all his food. I could do it little by little, so it wouldn’t look any different from the drugs they’ve got him on. He really doesn’t need to live any longer. How much sitting in the sun does one person need to do? It would certainly be convenient for me. I think there’s some minuscule old insurance policy. That would really be more than he’s ever done for me.”
Barry believed she was joking, but he said somberly, “I don’t think you should do that. Could be bad for the soul even to talk about it.”
“But Barry,” she said, more broadly now. “This is obviously why I don’t want you rattling around the house, getting underfoot. You might come across my stash of lye. So I won’t get my chance to pour it down the bastard’s throat in peace.”
“Mom.”
“Oh, Barry.” She waved him off.
“What’s your stash of lies?”
“Lye, Barry, lye. It’s a poison. Like arsenic or Drano or something.” The whole story bored her now. Her mouth lost color as it puckered into a twist again. “What is that thing?” she snapped. Pinning the black pebble with a fingertip, she pulled it along the lip of his tray. “Do we really need this?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s sort of important.”
“What is it?” When he opened his mouth, she added, “I mean, apart from the obvious. It’s a black rock.”
“I found it in the Colorado River this one time. By Gypsum. We were all thinking it soaked up negative energy.”
She looked at him, feeling pride, almost, at how poised he was in his daftness. She knew the daftness hadn’t come from her. Certainly not Lynn. (He’d contributed a big, fat nothing.) But wherever it came from—and she did have an idea—she thought she could at least take credit for his presence of mind, his tremendous presence of mind in the face of ridicule. She’d trained him well. “I see. So it’s a spiritual pebble. Do you think it’s working?”
“Could be. Usually it does.”
“And all that—crap in your little baggie—that was more amulets or whatever?”
“Right. Good medicine.” He grinned. “Top notch. I find these things. They sort of come to me, I guess.”
“Are you telling me, Barry, that you’ve become a medicine man?” He grinned with contented amusement, fondness, even. But he wiped his grin away when she asked, “Are you planning on doing anything weird to Lynn? Psychic surgery?”
“Of course not. I wish I knew something to do.”
“Because I wouldn’t mind at all,” Jeanette said affectionately. “If we had a really big one of these we could bash his head in with it.”
“He can’t be that bad. He’s a quiet guy, Mom. And this has got to be intense.”
“You know, loud, articulate, aggressive people can also be smarter and deeper than they seem,” Jeanette barked resentfully. “Nobody knows your father. Not even you. The man’s been half-alive his whole life. Who knows why God wasted his time shuffling him into a mortal coil? He belongs in limbo. He could never get it up to speak of, and there wasn’t any Viagra back when it mattered.” She flushed and stumbled. This was an outrageous and off-color thing to say, and she was unexpectedly exacting about what she would and wouldn’t say. Recovering with a shrug, she simpered at a slovenly, much-bobby-pinned girl who’d come to pick up their trays. “Monique,” if you tipped your head left. Monique took Jeanette’s tray. Then the girl froze, staring at the black pebble on Barry’s. She gave it a stagey, disdainful look. Barry had piled refuse on his tray and missed the stone behind it all. When Monique eyed him uneasily—the beanie, the choker—he smiled. He offered her the tray. She looked back at the pebble as if its slight unseemliness were so enormous she couldn’t touch, much less take, Barry’s tray.
“It’s a fucking pebble, OK?” Jeanette said. “Big deal! Just take them, will you?” She plucked the stone from Barry’s tray.
“Well, and bitch to you too,” Monique muttered in Jeanette’s face, before sweeping off with the trays. A yellow burger wrapper pirouetted on one tray. And a folded napkin jack-knifed to the floor in her wake.
Like a naughty child, Jeanette bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she offered. She asked Barry, “Was I a bitch first, or was she? I can never tell.”
“That’s a tough call,” her son said thoughtfully.
Jeanette’s mouth was turned down in regretful displeasure. Squarish red patches had appeared on her cheeks. Her hands, which had vanished contritely under the table, reappeared holding the pebble. “I don’t think this works.” She touched her face with it, a little bit all over, as if it were a powder puff. “Or I need an extra strong dose. No surprise there, I guess, huh?”
Excerpted from The Beads (Itna), to be published in September 2024.
DAVID McCONNELL is the author of American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men (Akashic, 2013), which won the 2014 American Library Association Award for Non-Fiction. His other novels include The Firebrat (Attagirl, 2003) and The Silver Hearted (Alyson, 2010). His short fiction and journalism have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Granta and Between Men. He lives in New York City.