Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner Page A

I’m sure. Please do it for me. Maybe we can even make a family meal of it. Like the old days.”
    â€œHave you ever had it before?”
    â€œNo. Never.”
    â€œThen why?”
    â€œBobby knows why.”
    â€œOh yeah?”
    â€œIt’s this book. It makes mommy hungry for Paris.”
    â€œParis is where your father and I took our honeymoon. You know the story.”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œLet Bobby tell!”
    â€œOkay Bobby, tell.”
    â€œMomma and dada went to Paris, and they went to a romantic little restaurant with candles and red lampshades, a bis . . . a bis . . . ”
    â€œBistro.”
    â€œA bistro. And momma couldn’t understand anything on the menu ‘cause it was all in French except one thing, rice and veal, so she ordered that. Only it wasn’t rice and veal.”
    â€œIt was
ris de veau
. Sweetbreads.”
    â€œAnd dada was so proud of her for ordering it ‘cause it made her so so-phis-ti-cated. But when it came she almost puked. So when dada went to the bathroom she scraped the whole thing into her bag and pretended she’d eaten it. And she never told dada what she did.”
    Wes could see what was going on here. Whenever his mother had a momentary upswing, its effect on Nora was like a sugar rush, she became overexcited and acted silly, which his mom would egg on, thrilled to be the center of anybody’s attention. That explained the sweetbreads and the baby talk. Both of them would crash soon enough, leaving Wes to clean up the mess, but he could hardly begrudge his mom for feeling frisky.
    â€œAnd now you’re sorry for what you did. Twenty years later.”
    His mother had closed her eyes, and her hand had slipped from his and was now groping, crablike, across the counterpane in a blind search for the remote. Nora turned her eyes to Wes in alarm, but his mother’s face offered no sign that she had recognized the resentment in his voice.
    â€œThat’s right. I’m sorry and I want to try it. How do you like them apples? It’s never too late to learn something new.”
    â€œYeah,
Leslie
. How do you like them apples?”
    Nora was too young to remember a time when their mother had been in full health, but Wes was not, and he found the ups and downs disorienting. He had been through this before, periods of rapid deterioration followed by gradual recovery that never fully returned her to what she had been before the latest attack, and the pneumonias and the bed sores and the incontinence, and he knew better than to allow himself to believe that she was getting better. It almost made him angry, as if she were playing a game with them, which of course she wasn’t. Even in this light he could see Nora scanning their mother’s face for signs of new growth, as if the spring had come, and he wanted to shout at her, at both of them, for making things more complicated than they needed to be. For the briefest moment, he suddenly saw the image of Prince André, pale and gaunt on his death bed, with a repentant Natasha at his side, all mystically aglow with the prospects of a new life. Nora had nothing to repent, she was only twelve, but Wes knew that she was consumed with fear and guilt—she herself didn’t understand what she was feeling, but Wes did—and every time his mother seemed to be improving it was as if she had been reprieved, and she was momentarily, like Natasha, filled with naïve hopes for the future and the sense that she had been absolved and redeemed. Only she had never done anything wrong. She was the only one who never did anything wrong.
    â€œYou stay there, Nora. I’ll take care of it. Let me have the phone, please.”
    Crispy was still waiting by the front door, and wagged her tail in a despondent expression of optimism as Wes descended. He sat on the bottom step and returned to the iPedia entry on sweetbreads. At the foot of the page was a link to a