The End Game

As we walked into the restaurant, I tried to remember how we used to spend Mother’s Day, back when Dad was still alive and Nate and I were still just kids, not whatever we are now. I had a vague memory of a trip north to Weeki Wa chee Springs to see the mermaid show, another memory of Ma throwing a plate of frozen meat at Dad after he forgot to get her anything, another of us asking when kid’s day was and her telling us that every day was kid’s day, except that I don’t precisely recall ever having a day that felt all that celebratory for being the kind of kid I was.

Ma sat at a table with a huge vase of flowers in the middle of it. She looked positively beatific in her glow. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw her like that. When she saw us, she jumped up from the table and threw her arms around me.

“Oh, Michael,” she said, “you shouldn’t have.”

“It was nothing,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“It was just so unexpected,” she said. She was still holding on to me as I tried to get to a seat at the table, so I sort of had to drag her a bit. “So thoughtful! How did you remember my favorite flowers?”

I looked down at the vase. It overflowed with pink lilies, a burst of yellow sunflowers and a sprinkling of light blue irises. “I don’t know,” I said, but then I saw the card affixed to the vase. It said,

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, LOVE, MICHAEL amp; NATE.

“Oh, it’s perfect,” she said. “Such a surprise. I had to bring it from home so Fiona could see it. Isn’t it lovely, Fiona? Isn’t it a wonderful surprise? I didn’t think he’d remember now that he’s home.”

“It sure is,” Fi said.

When you’re not a spy anymore, it’s important to sometimes expect the best of people, even when past history suggests otherwise, because you might just find yourself pleasantly surprised by the actions of people like your dumb little brother, who maybe isn’t so dumb after all.

After a lunch consisting of Fiona quizzing my mother about the number of childhood friends and girlfriends I had (“I remember a neighbor girl named Julie Quint,” Mom told her, which got Fi excited until I reminded my mother that the Quints moved while I was still in preschool, and then she mentioned three friends, including Andre, who were currently guests of the state of Florida), I decided to wait until after we ordered dessert to bring up the uninvited appearance of Davey Harris in my life, or at least in the Target I frequent.

“Ma,” I said, “I can’t stress this enough. You can’t keep telling people your son the spy is home.”

“I don’t see why not,” she said, “no one believes me, anyway.”

“There’s a reason I didn’t tell you what I was doing all those years. You’ve seen enough now to know that it’s not a thing to play with. So if someone asks what I do for a living, just tell them I’m in sales. Retail. Import. Export.”

“I hate to lie, Michael,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“Well, then, just pretend. You don’t have a sudden moral opposition to pretending, do you?”

“You used to love pretending.”

“When you do it for a living,” I said, “it becomes a little less fun. Just, please, avoid the subject of what I do. Or did. We’ll all be safer.”

A sprightly dressed waiter dropped off a plate of chocolate cake for my mother, another mudslide for Fi and a squirt of frozen yogurt for me. For a time, we ate in silence. It felt nice. I hoped I’d essentially put a cap on the issue and we could all live our lives in perfect happiness for another thirty minutes, or at least the amount of time it took me to meet up with Sam and find out what job he’d conscripted me into.

“Did he play dress-up?” Fi asked my mother.

“Here we go,” I said.

“There was a time when he was twelve that he pretended for a week to have a broken leg,” Ma said. “Limped everywhere he went.”

“You made me do that,” I said.

“How could I make you pretend to have a broken leg? That’s just crazy, Michael.”

“Well, Ma, as I recall, you ended up getting the TG amp;Y to give you a couple hundred bucks in store credit, since you claimed one of their shopping carts malfunctioned and ran me over.”

My mother gets a nice blush of red in her face when she’s angry. At that moment, she looked like an apple. “That’s asinine,” she said, but there wasn’t much behind it, and she immediately began shoveling cake into her mouth.

“And didn’t Nate ‘pretend’ to have a broken wrist, too?”

“You know, Michael, I was just trying to do my best to raise you two. If my methods were unconventional, I’m sorry.”

“Unconventional? You had my leg put into a cast.”

“And all of your friends signed it,” she said. “It was wonderful for your self-confidence.”

“Didn’t we just determine that I didn’t have any friends, Ma?” I said.

“I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette.” My mother stood up, grabbed her purse and tucked her vase in the crook of her arm. “You can ruin someone else’s Mother’s Day if you like, but you’re not going to ruin mine.”