Lives of the Circus Animals by Christopher Bram

happy unbirthday to you.”
    She rolled her eyes, as if this old joke were too original for her. “I can’t say I like this, dear.” She fingered her own chin. “Makes you look like a billy goat.”
    â€œJust being fashionable.”
    She waved him through, then kissed her daughter on the cheek. “Jessica. You look good, dear. You’ve lost weight?”
    â€œNot an ounce!”
    They could never make other people understand why this quietly composed, seemingly harmless woman drove them nuts. But then Molly Doyle wasn’t other people’s mother.
    The house was furnished in Ethan Allen from three decades back. The family room bookcases were stuffed with old paperbacks, the mysteries their mother read as obsessively as she once smoked Salems—she had quit smoking five years ago. Hanging on the walls were shelves crowded with knickknacks: ceramic thimbles, dainty animals, blue-eyed Hummels, the tchotchkes that first appeared when Jessie went off to college, then metastasized after their father’s death. They had been a shock after Mom’s years of blunt practicality, an eruption of preciousness. Jessie once made a crack about this mob of fragile doodads, and Mom blithely replied, “Well, I don’t have to worry about grandchildren breaking them, do I?”
    She was very subtle. Calm and reserved, reasonable and civil, she hated the theatrics of confrontation. Caleb often wondered what would’ve happened if they’d had a more dramatic mother, a good loud Italian, say. Would he and Jessie have avoided theater?
    All that remained of their father was a single photo on the mantel, a handsome, hawk-faced man in a knit sports shirt. He’d been a cop in New York City before they were born, then a cop up here in Beacon. Mom displayed no pictures of him in uniform. He left law enforcement when they were kids to manage the local golf course. Bobby Doyle had been a friendly, noisy, sociable guy, a man’s man who preferred the company of men. He could be a doting, sentimental daddy when Caleb and Jessie were little, but he hadn’t known what to make of them as teenagers. Caleb remembered him as sometimes irritable, often well-meaning, always baffled.
    The dining room table was prettily set, but there was no aroma of food from the kitchen, only the house’s peppery smell of old flowers. The last traces of cigarette smoke and Old Spice aftershave had faded years ago. Mom must have picked up something ready-to-serve at ShopRite.
    â€œCome on into the kitchen, kiddos. You can tell me what you’ve been up to while I get things started in the microwave.”
    He and Jessie each took a diet soda from the refrigerator and sat at the Formica-topped table. Caleb liked the kitchen. It was the room where he felt most at home. These were his roots, he told himself, a faintly shabby lower-middle-class kitchen with floral curtains and a mint green refrigerator from the 1960s.
    â€œOld-fashioned midday Sunday dinner,” said Mom without a speck of irony as she popped open plastic containers. “Usually I just have a soup and sandwich alone. So. Tell me. What have you two been up to?”
    Jessie looked at Caleb with her eyebrows skewed together, daring him to go first.
    â€œOh, the usual,” he said. “Writing. Errands. Meetings. Nothing special.” But he couldn’t be completely dishonest. “I got to say, writing is very hard now. After the last play did so badly.”
    â€œBut you got paid, didn’t you?”
    â€œYeah. But not nearly as much as everyone hoped.”
    â€œYou’ll do better next time. I just know it. And Jessica? How are things with you?”
    She didn’t understand; she didn’t have a clue. She thought playwriting was just another job where you worked for a fee and sometimesgot a bonus. But theater was a foreign world to their mother. She had never even seen one of Caleb’s plays.
    Molly Doyle