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He would normally have said no, would normally have said no that it looked too hokey to have a hatchet on your belt. Those were the normal things he would say. But her voice was thin, had a sound like something thin that would break if you touched it, and he felt bad for not speaking to her.
Although Brian’s mother instigated the divorce, she is confused by Brian’s silent treatment and coldness toward her. She does not know that Brian knows about her affair. She tries to make a peace offering by giving Brian the hatchet before he leaves to see his father. Although Brian does not like or want the hatchet, he senses that it will hurt her more if he does not accept it and wear it on his belt. Despite his anger, Brian does what his mother asks because she seems vulnerable, and he does not want her to break.
She was sitting in a station wagon, a strange wagon. He saw her and she did not see him. Brian was going to wave or call out, but something stopped him. There was a man in the car . . . Brian saw this and more, saw the Secret and saw more later, but the memory came in pieces.
Brian’s mother has an affair with a blond-haired man, which is the Secret haunting Brian at the beginning of the novel. In Chapter 4, after Brian crash-lands with the plane, he remembers this moment when he discovered the affair. At first, it seems absurd for Brian to be thinking of the Secret amid a near-death experience, but it could be that he associates the physical and mental pain of the plane crash with the emotional pain of his family’s rupture. The damage caused by the crash apparently brings to mind the memory of the agony of his mother’s affair.
He knew everything about how his mother lived. She would have the small television on the kitchen counter on and be watching the news and talking about how awful it was in South Africa or how cute the baby in the commercial looked. Talking and making sound, cooking sounds.
In Chapter 17, after the tail of the plane resurfaces and Brian constructs his plan to retrieve the survival kit, his mind wanders to his mom’s familiar routine. Brian visualizes his mom watching the news and cooking, two activities that are usually mundane but would be luxuries for the stranded Brian. Interestingly, in this passage Brian is able to think about his mother without also dwelling on the Secret. Perhaps his loneliness and longing for someone with whom to share the sunset’s beauty stir in him a desire to return to the simple life he once lived with his mother, regardless of the choices she made.
