Страница 3 из 79
“I can almost see now why some families pretend they weren’t told,” Abby said after the holidays.
“Mm-hmm,” Red said, poker-faced.
Of Red and Abby’s four children, De
In birth order, he came third. Amanda was nine when he was born, and Jea
Which was not to say that De
One time in the grocery store, when De
Now she was being silly, Red told her.
And Abby said yes, yes, she knew that. She hadn’t meant it the way it sounded.
Teachers phoned Abby repeatedly: “Could you come in for a talk about De
Oh, there were moments of promise, now and then. He won a prize in a science contest, once, for designing a form of packaging that would keep an egg from cracking no matter how far you threw it. But that was the last contest he entered. And one summer he took up the French horn, which he’d had a few lessons in during elementary school, and he showed more perseverance than the family had ever seen in him. For several weeks a bleating, blurting, fogged version of Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 stumbled through the closed door of his room hour after hour, haltingly, relentlessly, till Red began cursing under his breath; but Abby patted Red’s hand and said, “Oh, now, it could be worse. It could be the Butthole Surfers,” which was Jea
But Abby said, “We’re his parents! Parents are supposed to be excited.”
Although he guarded his privacy obsessively — behaved as if he had state secrets to hide — De
And then when he reached his teens there was the drinking, the smoking, the truancy, the pot and maybe worse. Battered cars pulled up to the house with unfamiliar drivers honking and shouting, “Yo, Shitwank!” Twice he got in trouble with the police. (Driving without a license; fake ID.) His style of dress went way beyond your usual adolescent grunge: old men’s overcoats bought at flea markets; crusty, baggy tweed pants; sneakers held together with duct tape. His hair was unwashed, ropy with grease, and he gave off the smell of a musty clothes closet. He could have been a homeless person. Which was so ironic, Abby told Red. A blood member of the Whitshank family, one of those enviable families that radiate cla
By then both boys were working part-time at Whitshank Construction. De
De