Mike's Parents

No one ever got invited over to Mike’s house to spend the night, and if Mike was invited to your house he would sometimes mysteriously not be able to come at the last minute. His dad drank beer, a lot of beer. When Mike wanted to ask him for something, he would go in after the third beer but before the fourth. We kids called him Mr. Jim, and when you saw him at a flea Market on a Saturday morning or something he just seemed quiet, always a little surprised to see you. Not particularly interested either, but not mean or anything. He was from Texas originally, and usually wore jeans and a denim jacket. When he sat in the kitchen drinking beer he looked like he was probably thinking about Texas. Later, after the divorce, he went back there and got a job on a dude ranch.

Mike’s mom was from Germany, which made her seem odd. She smoked a lot and had a large curved scar on her throat from where the doctors had cut out a cancerous tumor when Mike was little. I always tried not to look at the scar, but your eye had a way of wandering back there when she wasn’t looking at you. She talked German-accented English in a sort of high-pitched chirping way that Mike was good at imitating, and she liked cheap-looking glass and steel furniture that made being in her house feel different from being in the other houses in the neighborhood. She was friendly and a little silly, and she liked art. She would take Mike to museums, and on long trips back to Germany, and you could sometimes talk to her about things that wouldn’t come up with most of the other parents. Once you got to know her, you eventually realized she didn’t like Jews or blacks. Mike told me that when she talked about black people at home she called them Schwarzen.