The Sky Is Falling by Caroline Adderson

something I’d like to talk to you about before he comes.”
    Joe Jr. shot me a glance, which seemed both significant and calculated not to be. I would have to tell him, I knew it then. More meat went in his mouth and when there wasn’t enough left in the package to make a decent sandwich, he tossed it back in the drawer. Instead of answering me, he said, “Gran, did Mom tell you I started the cello?”
    â€œWhat?” Rachel turned to me for confirmation.
    â€œIt’s true,” I said.
    â€œI’ll show it to you.” He beckoned to her and Rachel got up and followed Joe Jr. out of the room.
    â€œAfter that,” I called to Joe Jr., “I need to talk to you.”
    We’ve never told him about the trouble I got into when I was young. I didn’t want him to know his mother has a criminal record, despite the fact that the actual conviction is not very impressive. I didn’t want him to be ashamed of me, or someone at school to find out. I would never, ever want him to be ostracized.
    While Rachel was in the bedroom with Joe Jr. and the cello, I made burritos. Joe Jr. was using the bow now, hitting about 50 percent of the notes (enough accuracy to plunge me into melancholy). And I remembered our terrible cooking, Dieter alternating between spaghetti and payloaded chili. Nutritional yeast dumped over everything like yellow snow. Sonia, preparing for a time when food would be scarce, always served an approximation of bread and water. Pete was the most creative, a liberal spicer. Once I came into the kitchen when he was cooking and saw a half-dozen garlic cloves stripped and lined up on the cutting board. “Smash, smash, smash the state!” He brought down the knife, scraped the chunks into the pot. One lone survivor, having leapt to safety, quivered on the counter. Pete popped it in his mouth.
    The doorbell rang. I went to answer it and found Simon slouching on our mat, a six-foot-tall reminder of how like the newborn stage these teen years are—parents blind to the repul-siveness of the age except in other people’s offspring. Go Away indeed! Simon had an Adam’s apple now; it looked like he was gagging on a Russian word. There were the inevitable wires too, pumping in the jangle, and his teeth serving a three-year sentence in a metal cage. Compared with Joe Jr., Simon has taken self-skewering to a whole new level with actual grommets in his lobes I could see the light of day through. Yet when I opened the door, he took a step back, right off the mat, when, rightly, it should have been me recoiling from him. Under all the acne, I definitely perceived a flush.
    â€œHello, Simon.”
    He did that darty thing with his eyes, sniffed, made an utterance. Hi, I presumed.
    â€œJoey’s in his room,” I said, standing back to let the guitar case through.
    He’s not so bad. He actually reminds me of Joe years ago. And he took his boots off, which, considering the laces, was a major concession, though I wasn’t prepared to wait. “Go on in when you’re finished,” I told him, assuming he could read lips.
    I went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later I glanced up from grating cheese and saw him in the doorway, staring. “He’s in his room!” I added hand gestures.
    Right after Joe got home and washed his hands, literally and metaphorically, of the day’s suffering, we sat down to dinner. I never got the chance to ask Joe or Joe Jr. about the article.
    â€œJoey! Simon!”
    They looked up—startled, innocent, already helping themselves—and seeing Joe’s signal, jerked the earbuds out by the wires.
    â€œSo how was everybody’s day?” He turned to me and kissed my cheek. “How was your day, my darling? What happened at school, boys?”
    â€œNothing,” they chorused.
    I tattled. “Joe Jr. says he skipped a class. He came home and slept instead.”
    â€œIt was boring,” Joe