It was sometime that Fall, in the middle of the night. I was awakened by shoeless footsteps pounding past my bedroom down the wood-floor hallway. "Mrs. Stewart! Hey! Don't take one more step." It was Perkins' voice. I sprang out of my bed and watched out the window as Mom scurried out the door with an old Gap shopping bag. She turned with a worried look on her face, and stopped. I watched as Perkins turned on the porch light and walked across the lawn to meet her. They yelled, and she began to sob. He reached out to hug her.
I stumbled outside to join them, and proceeded to stare at them dumbly. I'm not really the question-asking type; I prefer to wait and observe. Perkins knew this. "Casey, tell your mom she can't be giving out food to everybody." I stared at my mother. Tears were still rolling down her cheeks, but she didn't seem angry anymore. "You can't," I said softly.
She gently set the bag down on the lawn. "Have you seen the Garrisons? They look terrible."
Perkins gestured across the street, a few houses down. "Mr. Stewart and I talked to them just yesterday. They said they were fine."
The pained look returned to Mom's face. "You know it's not true, you know how proud those people are. Why don't we spare just a little bit? We don't have children here. They have children! They have two children!" She burst again into sobs. Perkins threw his arms up in exasperation, as if to communicate that someone needed to talk some sense into her.
Admittedly, I wasn't in the greatest of moods to begin with, but that motion, that throwing up of the hands towards my mother, infuriated me. "Mom, go inside. Please. I'll be right there." I hugged her. "Okay?" She nodded. The wind was taken out of her sails. She slowly made her way inside, laboring to bring the bag of food behind her with a pitiful sort of drag. She sniffled. Without resetting my feet away from Perkins, I watched her until I saw half of her disappear up the hallway stares, then turned back to him with a finger in his face. "Don't you ever fucking do that again."
Perkins offered that same incredulous look he had given hundreds of times since high school. "What?"
I was about one more "what?" from hitting him. "Don't do that shit. My mom is not stupid, she's not a simpleton. Don't treat her like a fucking simpleton just because she feels the need to do something nice and you don't."
He dropped the facade, like I know he would, and like he has always done whenever he sensed I was truly upset. "Okay, dude. Look. I'm sorry. You know I don't really think that about your mom. You know I love her to death, because she's my mother now too." I tried to rebut, and Perkins anticipated it. "No, dude, look. My family is dead. I have accepted that. My mom and dad are dead. My sister is dead. Everyone I knew at my office is dead. And I mean it when I say that what I'm about to tell you isn't supposed to get sympathy, because honestly, I don't want it. You can keep it. Spend it on the Garveys over there."
"Garrisons?"
"Garrisons. Right. Anyway, listen. I have lost so much in the past year that I don't give a shit about what I've already lost. What I do give a shit about is us. Me, and you, and your mom and dad. As of right now, you are the closest people in the world to me. And I don't care if I have to see a hundred kids starve to death. I really don't. All that matters to me is looking out for our own well-being. Now look. You think it's selfish? You think I wouldn't help them if I could? We just can't afford to. When we went up to Baltimore with your dad to get this stuff, we didn't just fill the truck up with all the shit we could find and say, 'good enough'. We rationed, we planned, we figured in everything, and we determined that if we're going to survive until Spring, we had to have every last bit of it. You know that. Didn't you help me do the math on this?"
I stared at the ground. It wasn't that I didn't know he was right. It was that he was so certain about it. He didn't even seem to have a terribly hard time about it. I nodded.
He put his hand on my shoulder. "And you know. Listen, I know you think this is retarded or whatever, and I know you're tired of hearing it, but I'm serious. When I left the neighborhood, I know exactly what I saw. The big blue M. The Motorola M. Painted on houses, shirts, lots of shit. The kids seemed to get a kick out of it especially." He cocked his head when he saw my look. "Man! Does it seem so weird? I mean, you and me, and your mom and dad, and a lot of people we know, we've got our heads on straight. We wouldn't be about to swallow the fairy-tales we wrote in those things. But shit, you know how many stupid, easily manipulated...culturally dependent people there are out there. After being inundated with information and entertainment for their whole lives, all of a sudden the switch turns off and they have no TV, no Internet, no radio, no anything at all. And then word gets around that, wait, there's still a webpage they can access no matter what? And that these web pages are basically Bibles for how to live and what to do? It's completely ridiculous for shit like that to be in a modem's webpage. When they see that, it does not occur to them that it's just a bunch of twentysomethings fucking around. There's only one solution: that it was placed there by some sort of divine hand, or fate. Powerful shit."
I took a step back and began to chuckle. "How do you breathe, man? You just go off on these big long things, and..."
Perkins smiled and shrugged. "I'm a talker." He stooped down to pick up a brick of Ramen noodles that had fallen out of the bag before we walked inside together. When Perkins went off on these stories about our project, I always made sure to dismiss them immediately, and I did so here.
"I wonder where Matt and Wes are these days," Perkins wondered aloud.