Uncomfortable Talents [7]

Maybe it was some sort of freaky intuition she has, but Augie suspected that Sandra has the most acute detector of awkwardness he had ever encountered. She seemed to nose out the most uncomfortable topic, the one that people try to hid from the world, the one that always makes them hold their breath when the topic comes up at the dinner party. She finds everyone’s achilles heel and discusses it to death in that deliberate, nasally voice that seems to bore into your very core. “So tell me about your folks,” Sandra said as they took their daily walk with Chico. “They’re just like any suburban parents, I guess,” he said casually. Too casually, he knew. She was interested. “You’ll have to give me more than that, Mr. Mystery!” She smacked him playfully. “Alright, well my father’s a stockbroker. He caters to his rich snooty clients and smokes Cuban cigars when he’s not in the office...which is almost never,” Augie began racking off facts about his father. There was a not-quite-awkward pause. He had the sense that he ought to keep talking before Sandra asked the question he was dreading. Then again, there was almost not point in avoiding it, she would sniff it out, it was just her talent. “And your Ma?” Threre it was. Augie felt the familiar hot feeling around his collar and the lockjaw that forboad him from talking. Somehow he managed to force out the words. “She’s dead.” “Ohh, I’m sorry, hon!” And yet she plunged on. “Are you a Nanny child? You must be if your old man’s so filthy rich.” “No, he remarried,” Augie said coarsley, leaving out the part where his father never told him that Amy isn’t his real mother. That he caused his real mother to die in the streets for all intents and purposes, all because she wasn’t just perfect and shiny. Just because she wasn’t Amy. He was the one that had the affair. Augie could practically feel his eyes going out of focus as he remembered the day when he discovered it. It was a mere 5 months ago, even though it felt like years at least. He had been rummaging through his father’s desk, looking for his iphone that his father had confiscated. His father had blown his casket when he found out Augie had been skipping school and took the phone. Augie didn’t mind really, he didn’t have a girlfriend or any friends to speak of. I mean sure, he had his smoking budies and he knew some girls, but no one he needed to be in constant contact with. Then about two weeks into his parental probation, he ran out of the good stuff and had no way to reach his dealer. That was the one and only thing that motivated him to get off his ass. He had almost given up hope of finding it when something small, square and yellowed slid out of a small compartment behind one of the drawers. It had his name on it. When he began to read it, however, he realized that it was written in some sort of script. He hazarded a guess at Arabic and knew there was only one person who could help him. Coincidentally, it was the one person in his expansive but empty-feeling house he trusted. He was down in the kitchen in a flash, letter in hand. What could be so juicy that his father had it hidden away in the back of his desk so carefully? “Anastasia?” She was there, chopping shallots, her midnight black hair springing out of her bun, her nutty brown skin shining with perspiration. “Try this,” she said in her clipped, accented tones, popping a spoonful of creamy soup in his mouth before he could say another word. It was perfect— rich and spicy and wholesome, as usual. “Needs shallots,” he joked. She made no response besides a small smile before tipping them into the pot. “Anistasia, tell me about this,” he had said said, unable to wait a second longer. He shoves the letter under her nose and for the first time ever, she froze. Not a muscle moved, not her idle hands, not her expressive eyes, nothing. “I told him he needed to tell you sooner,” was all she’d said. And then the whole story had unfolded. The way on their honeymoon his father had slept with his true mother and then left her there when he left with his new wife, Amy. The way his true mother was the daughter of a local governer and was afraid to tell him when she discovered she was pregnant, bearing the American’s child. She had raised money on her own and run away, finding my father with the then-3-month-old Augustus. But what a surprise she had found when she got here. “Augie? Augie? Gustoooo?” she drew out her special little nickname for him, cutting into his consciousness. “Your ma?” “I don’t know my mother,” he said tersely. “Alright, alright, seems like I struck a nerve. Touchy, touchy....” It would have been the last straw, had I not known she didn’t mean it.It’s not as if she means to make people uncomfortable. Sure Sandra may be uncouth and ditzy and careless and flat out annoying sometimes, but she’s never deliberately mean. Not the way Augie had seen his father’s wife act before. The one he used to believe to be his mother. The thought made him uncomfortable, like maybe from his association with her, the way he even still loved her because he really thought she was his mother, made him mean, too. It was for these reasons he bit his tongue.