My stepfather agreed, half-distracted in that way adults have of not usually listening to you. Your mere presence reminds them of their age, their mistakes, and the vast distance they've allowed between the perfect plans they made and the sagging estate they've actually built. Adults can't really acknowledge you as a person; you're more like an accusation. At best you're like a gift they got but they don't know where to put it. You don't go with the things in the house.
Increasing his portion of half-distraction, Gene lived in a haze of writerly introspection grown gravid by his lifelong inability to actually write anything. The stage for his affair with Rita was surely set by his sabbatical the year before, during which he intended to write a book. At the end of the year, when he saw how little he'd accomplished and went back to teaching junior high school English, he must have been demoralized. There's a song inadvertently but exactly about Gene by the pop music ironist Randy Newman (best known to most for his novelty song "Short People": "Short people got/No reason to live"). It's called "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do."
By the time the Sidd Finch story came out, Gene was just weeks away from confessing his adultery to my mother, and the cloud must have thickened to a deep, impenetrable fog. So I shrieked at him to make sure he was hearing me: WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN?!
"Why don't you ask your mother what she thinks?"
Half-distracted, hazy, grownup. Ask Mom? What did Mom know about baseball? But he told me to ask her so I go and look for her. Mom is folding the laundry in her bedroom. "Mom, did you hear about Sidd Finch?" I don't even know why I'm asking her.
"Yes." Snap! goes the sheet as she flings it out for folding.
"Well, what do you think?"
Mom smiles at me and says, "I don't think there is a Sidd Finch."
