Spoonbenders

“Astral travel,” Irene said. “Remote viewing. Whatever you call it—Mom’s old stunt.”

“You’re saying Matty is psychic?”

“Don’t you Trebek me, Dad.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked innocently.

“You’re still doing it!”

Dad glanced at the house. “Perhaps we should keep our voices…? I mean—ahem—let’s keep our voices down.”

“Did you know about this?”

“I’ve recently learned that, yes, the boy has some ability. He’s had a few experiences, evidently.”

“He’s up there right now—” She waved in the direction of the attic room and the air above it. “—flying around in space! When the hell were you going to tell me?”

“Soon. Matty thought you wouldn’t take it well. He asked Frankie’s advice, and then I—”

“He told Frankie?” Suddenly those sleepovers made sense. “What’s next, getting the act back together?”

Teddy raised his eyebrows. “Do you think Matty would be willing to do that?”

“No!” Irene shouted. “It doesn’t matter what he wants. He’s fourteen!”

“You were nine when we started. Buddy was only five.”

“You do not get any parenting awards for that.”

Graciella opened the back door. “Chicken’s getting cold.”

“We’re not done talking about this,” Irene said to her father. “Not by a long shot.”

Irene stormed into the house. “Graciella. I want to start Monday afternoon. Because Monday morning I’m moving out of this house.”

“Okay…” Graciella said.

“Monday’s a holiday,” her oldest son, Julian, pointed out.

“I work holidays,” Irene said.

“Who’s moving?”

Matty had appeared at the doorway to the kitchen. Heads swiveled.

“What?” he asked. “What did I miss?”

“You, me, outside,” Irene said. “Now.”

“Can I get some chicken first? I’m starving.”

Irene took a breath. “One piece.”

—

Irene sat on the front porch—the new front porch, with its too-smooth tiles—and wished she had one of her son’s joints to smoke.

Matty’s father liked a good smoke. Irene did, too, back in the day. But that was just another bad habit she’d given up along with Lev Petrovski. She’d never told Matty why she didn’t marry his father. Maybe it was time to remedy that.

She’d only wanted two things from the man. (Man. Hardly. He was nineteen then, not even drinking age except in Wisconsin.) The first was a certain quality of DNA, by which she meant normal, unexceptional DNA full of dominant genes that would swamp whatever wild-ass trait the child might inherit from his mother and grandmother. She didn’t want a gifted child, an Amazing Telemachus. She wanted a normal son or daughter who would never be tempted to show off on a national talk show.

The second was Lev’s presence. His continuing presence. It seemed a low bar to require that he merely stick around after the child was born, but Lev couldn’t even manage that. The night she went into labor he was nowhere to be found. One a.m. and he was off with his buddies, unreachable. She’d told him to get a pager, but of course he hadn’t gotten around to it.

Dad was the one who drove her to the hospital. He wasn’t about to come into the room, however. “I’m not cut out for that,” he said, as if a glimpse of his daughter’s functioning cooch would send him spiraling into madness. She went in alone and lay down alone in a room that to her pregnancy-enhanced sense of smell was a steaming bath of disinfectant.

She’d never missed her mother so much. There’d been other milestones—birthdays, the death of her cat, her first period, her eighth-grade graduation—after which Irene would steal away to stare at her mother’s picture and hold one-sided mother-daughter talks. But that night in the hospital, pushing out a child into the hands of strangers, made her ache with longing. Even when they finally tucked her son beside her, she was wounded a second time, because she couldn’t show him to her.

Lev showed up later that morning. He apologized over and over. He expressed wonder at the baby. He said all the right things you should say after doing all the wrong things, but something had closed in her heart. He’d come straight from the bars, clothes thick with cigarette smoke, and she could barely tolerate him holding her son. Before he left the room she decided that he would never hold Matty again.

His presence was no longer required. And fourteen years later, it turned out that Lev had botched even the DNA portion of the test. The Petrovski genes were no match for the McKinnon magic.

It was time to have the talk she’d been dreading. Explaining the birds and the bees was nothing compared with the psychos and the psychics. Irene was thirty-one years old, the same age as her mother when she died, and a part of her had always believed that she’d be dead before she had to face this moment. But no.

Lucky her.

She was about to go back inside and chase down Matty when Frankie’s yellow Bumblebee van swung into the driveway and screeched to a halt. A moment later, a twenty-foot U-Haul eased up to the curb and parked in front of the house.

Loretta came out of the van and marched up the ramp, scowling like a demon. The twins scampered after her.