The Marks They Leave Behind

December

He missed her in December

"Who's the girl?"

Henry blinked and jerked his head around, one way and then the other, only to find his mother sat right in front of him, on the opposite side of the kitchen table. The glare of the overhead lights reflected off the blackened window behind her, and in the background, the discordant chatter of his father and siblings competed with the jaunty clamour of the 'Magnum, P.I.' theme tune that crackled through the old black and white television in the lounge. (According to his father, watching programmes in colour like the rest of the country was an unnecessary extravagance.)

Henry frowned at her. "What girl?"

"You're brooding," she announced, "have been all week. You're staring into space. You're sitting around in here like you did when you were little and you had something you were working up to telling me." She took a long slurp of tea and then lowered the mug to the table, her gaze never once leaving him. "So...who is she?"

He gave a mix between a shrug and a shake of the head. "There's no girl."

She raised her eyebrows at him and gave him a look like she were staring at him over the rims of her glasses, though she rarely ever wore her glasses—only when darning, or filling out the housekeeping ledger, or muttering about a dropped stitch in her knitting.

"What...?" A defensive edge sharpened his tone. "There's no girl."

"There better not be a girl." His father strode into the kitchen, past the table, and straight over to the refrigerator that stood by the back door. He tugged open the refrigerator door, causing the milk bottles inside to jangle against one another and letting out a flood of yellow-white light, and he grabbed a beer from the top shelf. "Don't want you turning up here with one of those types, all prim and prissy."

"Oh, leave him alone, Pat," his mother chided softly, casting the words over her shoulder. Then she slid her hand across the table and gave Henry's hand a squeeze. "Don't listen to him."

"You know what the problem is?" His father twisted off the bottle cap and chucked it into the collection that gathered in the old ice cream tub next to the sink so that it hit the heap with a clink. Then he leant back against the counter and stared at Henry. "The whole college system."

He paused for effect, perhaps hoping to get a rise out of Henry.

Then he swept one hand towards the window. "It's rigged against the little man. Never done an honest day's work in their lives, and they send their kids there so they never have to do an honest day's work either."

"Henry got in, didn't he?"

His father's voice shot up. "On some handout, a charity case." This time he swept his hand towards Henry, so forcefully that beer sloshed from the bottle and splashed onto the tiles, where it died away in fizzles. "Throw the poor kid a bone every now and again just so they can feel better about themselves, call themselves philanthropists, as though they aren't the ones oppressing the working class."

Henry prayed his mother wouldn't point out that technically he was paying his own way by joining ROTC, seeing as it would inevitably lead to another rant about the military, bringing the total for the week to five, maybe six.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, his father prevented his mother from saying anything at all by continuing with his rant about 'the elite'.

The words washed over Henry. He let them. He'd heard them enough times before, could probably recite the whole tirade along with his father if he so wished. Lazy...work-shy...exploitative...arrogant...silver spoons...social inequality... Meanwhile, his thoughts drifted into the foreground as they found their way back to Elizabeth.