by Cristi Donoso

There is a man, I say to myself, because I’ve taken myself out to lunch, two tables over, who will not let his son speak. This restaurant is the loud sort where anyone can have an argument or secret affair at a table for two and no one is likely to notice. Where you can talk to yourself if you must. Waiters in tawny button-down shirts and black pants move like phantoms between tables, carrying trays of food on arms extended toward the ceiling. Tin-thin silverware clatters as it’s collected on piles of plates. The trendy cement walls are painted over to create the image of a tapestry, with threads both taut and loose, both fast and broken. They beat the sound around the room, an endless volley of clangs and chatter, absorbing nearly nothing.

The man is seated next to the son, who is seated next to someone I presume to be the grandmother. Completing the table of four is a woman, apparently the boy’s mother. Her thick, auburn hair is tightly braided and the tie is wound around the braid’s end, a wad of split ends, several times. The father is yelling, yelling in a way that one can yell inside a restaurant like this one and not be perceived to yell, except to the people sitting at one’s own table. The boy sputs and starts sentences like a lighter that won’t flame. His father demands to know what he will order. The boy is crying now. Words don’t come out of his mouth, just flecks of saliva as he puts tongue to teeth and lips to teeth. Tiny ticking sounds that want to become words. I can’t hear them, but I see them, and they tip tap clearly in my mind.

The mother says nothing and looks despondent. Her features disappear into each other except for her freckles, which are the only part of her that appear yet alive. I imagine she was brightly red-haired child, given those freckles. I read once that people with red hair feel pain more acutely than others, or was it that they have a greater tolerance for pain? I believe her pain and her tolerance for pain may be meeting in this room, though I can’t imagine it’s for the first time.

Food arrives, later, for everyone but the son, who sits and stares blankly past his mother’s face. The grandmother eats with enthusiasm. Smugness sits between the two corners of her mouth. But she’s not completely unsympathetic, glancing at the boy between bites. When she finishes her meal, she pushes the plate away and puts her right hand on the boys neck. She brushes her nails up and down his neck in a way she must think is soothing. From my acute angle of sight, I can see that it is not. The muscles in the boy’s face harden. His jaw is bulky this way, making him look older than he is. The father eats. The mother holds a small forkful in the air but doesn’t bite. The grandmother keeps stroking, stroking, stroking. I touch the back of my own neck, protective. The stroking keeps up, stroking, stroking, stroking. I think something may escape my mouth, and it does. Stop, I say only to myself. Stop. Stop. But she doesn’t stop. Then the boy pushes his chair back with his feet, puts his chest to his legs and laces his fingers behind his neck. His grandmother’s hand reels back like an automatic cord. There is quiet for a moment, a quiet lacking in peace.

The grandmother then finds a place on the boys back and behinds her stroking again. The angry father growls his judgments towards his son. The mother says nothing. My stomach clutches at the food I’ve just eaten and I worry I’ll throw it all up right on this table. Then, they’re standing. The whole family gathers itself, suddenly united, as if moving by one mind. And then I am standing, too. Their bodies weave around the tables and towards the door, away from the tapestry of sound and into stark sunlight. I follow. I can’t help but follow and I can see that they are squinting, and I am squinting. The father is still berating the son and the mother, his body turning and turning as he looks at them and then ahead, and then back at his belittled family. The grandmother, behind them, walks tall with self-righteousness. The father sees me walking behind, looks at me with an angry curiosity, ready to bark—and begins to step backwards into the street. I open my mouth but my stomach clutches again and no voice leaves my mouth. The mother and son stop in place, as if struck. The mother says nothing. The boy sputs again, a small sound like stp. The grandmother shouts NO but the bus arrives before her voice does and then the father is quiet.

I feel terrible about all this, because this is how I will remember them all—terribly, terribly quiet.