Spoonbenders

In other words, the usual. Wide awake in the thin hours of the night, her mind churning along on the All-Star Tour of Embarrassments and Mistakes. The tour could visit any decade, and feature any number of characters from her past, from middle-school girlfriends to strangers she’d never known the names of. She’d remember a conversation or, more often, an argument, and try desperately to get her previous self to say something smarter, or kinder, or nothing at all. Yester-Irene’s behavior, however, was almost willfully resistant to modification.

Lately the tour had been returning again and again to the most disastrous period in her life: the last year in Pittsburgh. In that time she’d gone from dream job (or at least, the best she could hope for with only an associate’s degree) to alleged criminal. It had broken her financially and emotionally. Matty had caught her more than once sitting at the kitchen table, hate-crying into a pile of bills and overdue notices. Which only made her feel worse. A child shouldn’t see his mother worrying about money. It made the kid into a figurehead parent, with all the responsibility and none of the power. She knew this from personal experience.

She pulled on her robe and went into the hall. The house was quiet except for Buddy’s snore. Her usual insomnia treatment was to read until the book dropped out of her hand, but when sleep seemed impossibly out of reach, she’d do penance for her wakefulness by performing some onerous task: cleaning out the refrigerator, balancing the checkbook, verifying the date of each canned good in Dad’s basement pantry. (Scariest find: a can of kidney beans purchased by her mother twenty-five years ago.) Some nights Irene came dangerously close to pitching in on one of Buddy’s renovation projects.

None of that appealed to her tonight. She went downstairs and drifted through the first-floor rooms, her eyes growing wide in the dark. Surfaces caught errant light and became strange. Objects trembled with arrested motion, waiting for her to glance away. Every chair and table became a wary animal. Don’t be afraid, she thought. It’s just me.

Irene had realized at her mother’s funeral not only that she had inherited her position as Sole Responsible Adult, but that she’d been training for the job since she was ten. She was the one who’d managed Buddy’s tantrums. She was the one who’d poured water onto Frankie’s bed to get him up and out to school. (Only had to do that twice, but it worked.) Most of all, she learned how to keep Dad out of her way. She resented the job, but she was secretly proud of it. She knew that if she had not grabbed the wheel, they would have all gone over the cliff.

It wasn’t until the winter after she’d graduated high school, in the wide backseat of the Green Machine, that she was asked the question she’d been waiting to hear all her life. Lev Petrovski, half naked and beautiful and sweating despite the frost outside the windows, pressed his forehead to hers and whispered, “But who’s going to take care of you, Irene?”

This was not a statement she could weigh for truth. It was a question, and her heart shouted the answer: You, Lev. You will.

What a stupid, stupid girl she was.

On her second circuit of the first floor, she became aware of a faint, shifting light emanating from the basement. She went down the stairs and saw that Matty had left the new PC running. Multicolored lines zigzagged across the screen.

She sat at the desk (a battered hulk that had once occupied a corner of Frankie and Buddy’s bedroom) and touched the keyboard. A field of blue appeared, and icons popped up like square flowers. It was a new version of Windows, and everything seemed shinier and somehow more insistent than what she’d used at her old job. Back then she’d been considered the office computer expert, not because of any actual expertise, but because her immediate supervisor had abdicated all technological responsibility. It fell to Irene to print out the electronic mail (or else how could the partners read it?) and become the guru of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

She bent to look for the computer’s off switch, and noticed that Matty had already hooked it up to a phone jack. It’s got a built-in modem!

Irene got up without turning off the machine. The little clock on the screen said that it was 12:32.

She went upstairs and found the stack of mail that had accumulated over the past couple of days. There were five AOL CDs, each one promising 50 FREE HOURS! Well, she thought, if there was one thing she had, it was free hours.