“And what do you think you’re doing, young man?”

He knew he was in trouble. Mom’s hand was on her hip, still holding the wooden spoon she’d been stirring with. A drip of vivid red sauce had landed on the otherwise-impeccable kitchen floor, which would annoy his mother if she had looked down at her own tapping foot.

“But I’m hungry!” he said. He was growing like a weed and was finally old enough that he’d learned to keep the whining wheedle from his voice. She was thankful of it, but not thankful that he’d helped himself to several lady fingers from the cookie jar.

“Well, it’s too late for a snack: dinner will be ready soon. If you keep yourself busy, the time will pass more quickly.” She twisted on the spot, and handed him a net bag from the counter behind her. “Here, go collect the windfall apples for me. Oh, and throw the zombie apples in the composter.”

“What are zombie apples?” His brow knit.

“Oh, you know: the ones that are all brown and rotten and shrivelly.” She grinned, and then thrust her arms out and grimaced. “Braiiiins!” She dropped her arms and giggled. It would be years before he found that embarrassing.

“But Mom…” he trailed off. He’d turned ‘Mom’ into a six-syllable word, which was nearly a record for him. Darn, she thought. He must be really hungry.

“Fine,” she said. “Just go deal with the zombie apples. You may feel free to do the bare minimum.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And when it comes time to give you your allowance, you may find that you receive the bare minimum.” She’d got her ‘I will rise above this’ voice on, meaning that there was still a goodly length of the maternal tether to spare, but you could definitely see the end of it from here.

He had his grandfather’s eyes, which he rolled dramatically. She thrust the bag at him “And I think you’ll find you’ve reached your eye-rolling quota for the day, young man. Go. Dinner will be ready soon.”

He put the lid back on the cookie jar, and muttering something about child slavery, took the bag from his mother, and shuffled into the garden.

 __________________________________________________

Twenty minutes later, he reappeared, the bag nearly full of apples. After being quizzed on the thoroughness of his work (Yes, the lid was back on the composter; no, he’d not checked under the hedge. She made a mental note to warn Ted to keep his eyes open for kamikaze apples when he mowed the lawn this week), hands were commanded to be washed and the table set: Dinner was ready.

It was just the two of them tonight – Dad was off hunting with his buddies. They’d both felt it was important for them to keep up with friends and activities outside the house, not only to keep their own sanity, but as a good example to the boy. She and the boy had moved their chairs to sit opposite each other; she felt that leaving Dad’s chair empty when he was away was a bit macabre, like saving a dead man’s place at the table.  Despite his absence, she’d made just as much as usual: he’d be home tomorrow afternoon, proud and tired, with his share of whatever he and his cronies had managed to hunt.  Tonight’s leftovers would make a light lunch tomorrow, and then she’d spend the afternoon skinning and gutting and wrapping meat for putting in the chest freezer. Being a butcher’s daughter had its advantages.

He waited as patiently as he could, squirming in his seat until Mom said grace, which she always did in one breath after a big start.

“FooorwhatweareabouttoreceivemaytheLordmakeustrulythankfulamen.”

She speared a few slices of meat off the big oval plate in the middle of the table.

“Mom, why do zombie apples get like that? Like, how can two apples fall off the tree at the same time, and a few days later, one’s all rotten, and the other one’s fine?”

Mom paused, three slices of meat now draped on the smaller plate in front of her. “Well, sometimes a bug or a fungus manages to get inside the apple while it’s still on the branch and we don’t see it until the damage causes it to fall, so an apple that looks perfect on the outside may be rotten to the core. Conversely, sometimes the apples that look a bit funny, or that have a bit of an bruise on the outside are actually perfectly lovely on the inside. I guess apples are like people in that respect, which is something you should keep in mind when you start calling on girls.”

He rolled his eyes. “Mo-om. People are nothing like apples.” This was a tactical error on his part: This could easily turn into a Valuable Lesson.

“Oh, really? Well, take our former neighbour, the late Professor Martin.” She handed him the smaller plate of meat. “He seemed like a perfectly upstanding man, didn’t he?” The boy nodded, his mouth already full. “Well, after he died of a brain tumour, they found all sorts of things on his computer that shouldn’t have been there. Or on anyone’s computer, for that matter.”

Flapping his hand at his face to indicate that he had something important to say, the boy chewed at a violent pace and forced the meat down. “What kind of thing?” He sensed a secret.

“Well,” she said, forming the answer as diplomatically and age-appropriately as she could, “They found lots of pictures of children.”

The boy was puzzled.  “Of course there were pictures of kids. He was a grandfather.”

“Yes, and I’m sure it will come to some comfort to a number of people that there weren’t any pictures of his grandchildren on his computer.”

It was a secret he couldn’t grasp the thread of, so he filed it away, and got back to his dinner.

“Mom, what’s this?”

“It’s a brain tumour, sweetie – eat around it.”