Choke

Chapter 9

IT WAS ONE AFTERNOON when our stupid little boy and his foster mother were in a shopping mall that they heard the announcement. This was summer, and they were shopping for back to school, the year he was going to be in fifth grade. The year you had to wear shirts with stripes to really fit in. This was years and years ago. This was only his first foster mother.

Up-and-down stripes, he was telling her when they heard it.

The announcement:

"Would Dr. Paul Ward," the voice told everybody, "please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth's."

This was the first time the Mommy came back to claim him.

"Dr. Ward, please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth's."

That was the secret signal.

So the kid lied and said he needed to find the bathroom and instead he went to Woolworth's, and there, opening boxes of hair color, was the Mommy. She had a big yellow wig that made her face look too small and smelled like cigarettes. With her finger- nails, she opened each box and took out the dark brown bottle of dye inside. She'd open another box and take out the other bottle. She put the one bottle in the other box and put it back on the shelf. She opened another box.

"This one's pretty," the Mommy said, looking at the picture of a woman smiling on the box. She switched the bottle inside with another bottle. All the bottles the same dark brown glass.

Opening another box, she said, "Do you think she's pretty?"

And the kid's so stupid he says, "Who?"

"You know who," the Mommy said. "She's young, too. I just saw the two of you looking at clothes. You were holding her hand, so don't lie."

And the kid was so stupid he didn't know to just run away. He couldn't begin to even think about the very definite terms of her parole or the restraining order or why she'd been in jail for the past three months.

And switching bottles of blond into boxes for redheads and bottles of black into boxes for blondes, the Mommy said, "So do you like her?"

"You mean Mrs. Jenkins?" the boy said.

Not closing the boxes just perfect, the Mommy was putting them back on the shelf a little messed up, a little faster, and she said, "Do you like her?"

And like this is going to help, our little stooge said, "She's just a foster mom."

And not looking at the kid, still looking at the woman smiling on the box in her hand, the Mommy said, "I asked you if you liked her."

A shopping cart rattled up next to them in the aisle and a blond lady reached past to take a bottle with a blond picture but a bottle of some other color inside it. This lady put the box in her cart and got away.

"She thinks of herself as a blonde," the Mommy said. "What we have to do is mess with people's little identity paradigms."

What the Mommy used to call "Beauty Industry Terrorism."

The little boy looked after the lady until she was too far away to help.

"You already have me," the Mommy said. "So what do you call this foster one?"

Mrs. Jenkins.

"And do you like her?" the Mommy said, and turned to look at him for the first time.

And the little boy pretended to make up his mind and said, "No?"

"Do you love her?"

"No."

"Do you hate her?"

And this spineless little worm said, "Yes?"

And the Mommy said, "You got that right." She leaned down to look him in the eyes and said, "How much do you hate Mrs. Jenkins?"

And the little cooz said, "Lots and lots?"

"And lots and lots and lots," the Mommy said. She put her hand for him to take and said, "We have to be fast. We have a train to catch."

Then leading him through the aisles, tugging his boneless little arm toward daylight outside the glass doors, the Mommy said, "You are mine. Mine. Now and forever, and don't you ever forget it."

And pulling him through the doors, she said, "And just in case the police or anybody asks you later on, I'm going to tell you all the dirty, filthy things this so-called foster mother did to you every time she could get you alone."