Watch Your Mouth Read Online Free Page B

like a bug to a windshield. Cyn and I had killed so many bugs on the way to Pittsburgh that we’d run out of the blue soapy fluid that sprays from under the hood, and we had to stop and wipe the insects off the glass with the same sticky T-shirt we’d used to wipe sperm off our legs after our lunch in the back seat. Unsure whether laughter was appropriate, I looked down at my plate and for a moment I thought there was something wrong with my eyes: the salmon had split into two separate continents, with only my startled fork as a stainless steel Bering Strait. No. The plate was broken, smacked in half like a pair of breasts.
    “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” I stuttered. A high hornet buzz from a few violins. “I dropped my fork. I’m really sorry, I’ll pay for it.”
    “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Glass said quietly. Under her bangs, long and straight as venetian blinds, her face had gone powder-pale. She licked her lips. She wasn’t looking at me. Gramma was wiping her mouth with a napkin that matched everybody’s. Steven was taking his napkin and dabbing at the glob on the wall which was stuck there in a neat spoonful. I couldn’t un- derstand why everything felt like a funeral until I tried to meet Cyn’s eyes. She was looking at her father.
    I’m a sucker for filling silence. Once I open my mouth there’s no stopping me. “I’m very sorry. Of course I’ll pay for the plate.” Nobody said anything. Against the still-buzzing violins was only the sound of Steven’s napkin against salmon against saliva against the wall. “It’s weird that it broke that way, don’t you think? There must have been some secret fault in the plate or something. You know, like when small earthquakes split big buildings. I read about this somewhere. Buildings that were sup- posed to be earthquake-proof, it turned out that a bunch of microscopic air pockets lined up in just the right way, by sheer coincidence, so even though the buildings were earthquake- proof it turned out that they couldn’t protect themselves from earthquakes. Steven, you probably know more about this. Cyn said you were a science guy—do you know something about this? This wasn’t even the plate that had the crack. What’s that?” That was the table shaking, rattling the serving spoons and making the unlit candles shake in their holders. I thought for a minute that the story I was telling was being fleshed out there in the dining room. But it was Dr. Glass. He looked like a vol- cano. His face was dark red and his hands were clenched into trembling fists and although it was probably just steam from the string beans it looked like smoke was coming out of his
    nostrils. It was making the table shake, that and the timpanis.
    “I’ll—go—get—dessert—” he stuttered in a terrible voice, and reached across the table toward me. I shrank back—it looked like he was going to throttle me—but he merely grabbed both halves of my split plate and carried them into the kitchen like Moses down from Sinai. A small river of sake-sauce began to widen on the tablecloth in front of me. Except for the color
    it looked like the stains on my sheets that had me eating dinner here in the first place. What in the world was going on?
    “Did I say—” I swallowed as the Glass eyes swiveled like periscopes to my stained place at the table. “Did I—something wrong?”
    Cyn smiled and half-shrugged. “You said everything wrong,” she said. “It’s O.K. You don’t know and Dad knows you don’t know.”
    “What—”
    “Dad had a catastrophe recently at work,” Steven said, bun- dling up Gramma’s wad in his napkin like a party favor.
    “It wasn’t a catastrophe, ” Mrs. Glass said, thumping her wa- ter glass down and picking up some intact plates. “That’s the whole problem. He keeps thinking it was a catastrophe. It was just—”
    “A mistake?” Cyn said, raising her eyebrows. “Well, it wasn’t a success, let’s just put it that way.”
    “My son is a