Mobile Library by David Whitehouse

Worried that as it faded further she would get smaller in his mind, he set about trying to re-create the scent.
    Using an empty glass vase as a mixing cauldron, he discovered that a combination of aquamarine setting lotion and her “frizz-free” conditioner formed a near-perfect base note. Adding half a tube of her favorite toothpaste and what was left of her perfume made it too minty, too watery. It didn’t quite work. Bobby’s mother’s skin had a medicinal quality, a cure-all balm he could inhale to be fixed from the inside. He needed to replicate it as precisely as possible, so he mashed a stick of lip balm to a fine paste, then added that to his own serum of antiseptic lotion and mouth ulcer ointment and poured it into the vase. It wasn’t perfect, but holding his nose and mouth over the opening and inhaling as deeply as he could, he was closer to her than he had been in a while. He was also high, and so found that all of his ideas were good ones.
    Bobby wrapped his arms around the pendulous bell of the vase, then liberally splashed its contents over every surface in the room. The bed. The walls. Cindy’s many cases. It was time to prepare the welcome party. He wanted to be ready.
    Finding old ribbon in his mother’s craft box, he tore it into strips and hung them from the ceiling. Some of the strips were too springy, so he stole a handful of Cindy’s hair rollers to weight them. He removed the white sheet from his bed and suspended it across the length of the far wall. Then he used Cindy’s foundation and sponge to write WELCOME HOME. The words looked strange in the same salmon shading of his father’s girlfriend’s face.
    When his mother left she didn’t take her jewelry. Most of it was kept beneath his bed in a plastic tub. He shook it, delighting in the angelic clatter of the metals, which reminded him of her fingers moving up and down his back while she sang. He arranged the rings in a circle, silver on the left side and the gold on the right, positioning her bracelets in the center, the smaller ones inside the bigger ones, like the concentric ripples on a freshly skimmed pond.
    Lacking any musical equipment, he quietly whistled her favorite songs, inventing melodies to replace those he couldn’t quite recall. He was a blow whistler, not a suck whistler, and that’s why he had to pause for a second as he lit the candle, because he only had two matches. Luckily he managed it on the first attempt and slipped the spare match into his pocket for use later. The tang of burnt sulfur had given him a winning idea for revenge that he dreamt about when he fell asleep on the rug, exhausted not by the beating , he told himself stoically, by the counting . When he woke the candle wax had crawled across the carpet toward him. He wished that it had covered him, entered him, thickened his skin. Any extra armor he could gather would be needed when he made the dream a vengeful reality.
    His father told him he was not to return to school that week. Though he said that Mrs. Pound had granted him leave, Bobby knew that his father needed time for the bruises to fade. Under strict instructions not to leave the house, Bobby had plenty of opportunity to hone his idea, practicing the plan over and over in his head for seven whole nights, through which his passage was eased by fantasies of his mother’s return.
    Sitting in silence on the staircase, forbidden from showing his face and with his buttocks still stinging too much to disobey, he listened to the clack of the scissors as Cindy recounted to her customers how the woman who lived down the road had stripped him nude and bathed him. Each time she told the story it mutated into new and fathomless forms. By Friday it had changed beyond his recognition.
    â€œShe was in the bath with him, behind him,” she said.
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBruce found lipstick on his