The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  “Of course,” said Reverend Judy. “And that’s when he did it?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was listening, of course, but in the way that you listen to a conversation from the booth behind you at a restaurant. I was thinking that the Djukanovics were a mother, a father, and daughter just like Alice and Charlie and Laila had been, or just like me and Robert and Alice, although I didn’t equate Alice with Mrs. Djukanovic, even though they were both the mothers, but with Wanda. I suppose that’s because Alice was my daughter. I remembered Mrs. Djukanovic smacking Wanda when she broke the Dreamhouse, and I must have made a strange face or perhaps even some sort of noise, because Reverend Judy leaned forward across the coffee table and touched my knee and said, “Would you like to pray?”

  For a second I thought she meant did I want to go up to my bedroom and pray but then I realized she was asking me to pray with her, right there in the living room. I wondered if she would make us get down on our knees, but then I realized of course she wouldn’t, we didn’t even do that in church.

  “Shall we pray?” Reverend Judy asked.

  I realized I had let things go too far. “No,” I said. I stood up. I picked up the plate with the pound cake on it and went into the kitchen and took it off the plate and wrapped it up as neatly as I could in the tinfoil. It still had the bow taped to it, and because we had eaten some of it the bow wasn’t in the center anymore, but I couldn’t help that. Back in the living room, Reverend Judy was standing up, looking at the photograph of Alice and Laila that is on the mantelpiece. She turned to me but before she could say anything I held out the rewrapped pound cake and said, “Thank you so much for visiting and for the pound cake, but since Robert is diabetic I’m afraid we can’t have it in the house.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t know,” I said. “How could you?”

  She looked a little confused, and for a moment I felt sorry for her. It was a hard job, butting into people’s lives day after day, trying to fix all the things that were broken. I gave her the pound cake and put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Judy. Robert and I are fine. You don’t have to worry about us.”

  She looked down at the pound cake as if she had never seen it before and wasn’t sure what it was or what she should do with it.

  “Why don’t you take that to the Djukanovics?” I said. “I think they’d really appreciate a nice homemade pound cake like that.”

  When Reverend Judy was gone, I sat for a while in the living room, which I never do, but every once in a while it’s nice to sit in there and look out at the street, although nothing much ever goes by. (We live on a cul-de-sac.) The dog from next door, I think his name is Rolly, a sort of beagle-basset mix, waddled over and calmly did his business on our front lawn, and then returned home, and I hoped that Robert, who was of course up in his hobby room, wasn’t looking out the window because that dog infuriates him. It was very quiet in the house, and I listened to see if I could hear Robert doing anything up in his hobby room, but I couldn’t. He was probably napping. I think he naps a lot up there, and that may be why he was so cranky while the Djukanovics were here, because he couldn’t nap down in the basement. I should have brought the rollaway cot down there for him.

  I went upstairs and knocked at his closed door, and I felt as wary and daring as I had the last time I had knocked on it, the morning the Djukanovics left.

  “What?” Robert said.

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I heard her go. What did she want?”

  “To talk,” I said. “And pray.”

  “Pray?” Robert said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you?” Robert asked.

  “No,” I said. “I told her you were diabetic.”

  “What?” asked Robert. “Why?”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s a long story. But I lied to a minister. Were you asleep?”

  “No,” said Robert.

  “I thought you might be napping,” I said.

  After a moment, Robert said, “Why did you lie to Reverend Judy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I put my hand up against the door, my palm flat against it. “I miss Pastor Abbott,” I said.

  “He knew when to leave well enough alone,” said Robert.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s time to stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Going to church,” said Robert.

  “Oh,” I said. It had never occurred to me to stop going to church. Robert and I had always gone to church. If we stopped, people would think it was strange, but that didn’t really seem a good reason to keep going.

  “What do you think?” Robert asked.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “It’s a good idea.”

  “Because you can still go if you want,” said Robert. “But I want to stop.”

  “No,” I said. “Me too. I want to stop.” It felt a little silly talking through the closed door like that, and I thought about opening it, but then I realized there was no reason to. I knew what Robert looked like. I didn’t need to see him. “Are you ready for lunch?” I asked.

  “I suppose,” said Robert.

  “What would you like? I could heat up that lasagna. Or would you like a sandwich? I have turkey and ham.”

  “You have the lasagna,” Robert said. “I’ll have a sandwich. Turkey. With cheese, if you have it.”

  NICOLE CULLEN

  Long Tom Lookout

  FROM Idaho Review

  LAUREN DRIVES until she can’t drive anymore. She pulls to the side of the road and a dust cloud rolls over the windshield and into the dark. It’s five o’clock in the morning. The headlights flood an irrigation canal black with water, a jack fence, and the beginnings of a field. The boy sleeps in the passenger seat. He’s five years old and too small to ride in the front, but Lauren is too tired to fight. He wears a bicycle helmet and her husband’s old high school letterman jacket, the letter decorated with four gold winged-foot pins. Lauren places her hand on the boy’s back to know he’s breathing, and she thinks what she’s been thinking since they left Texas—that she has no intention of being his mother.

  The boy’s name is Jonah, but her husband calls him The Boy. He calls his affair with the boy’s mother The Mistake. For five years the boy was no more than a dollar amount paid in child support each month. Then last week his mother was convicted of drug possession, and Child Protective Services showed up on Lauren’s doorstep. Mr. Lyle had been contacted, the caseworker said, and he’d provided this address. Was Lauren not Mrs. Lyle, the boy’s stepmother and legal guardian? Lauren answered with a hesitant yes, and the caseworker explained in no uncertain terms that Jonah would be otherwise placed in foster care. He had nowhere else to go.

  Now Lauren and the boy are in Idaho, and her husband Keller is on a skimming vessel on the Gulf of Mexico. He left Galveston six months ago to work on a commercial fishing boat out of New Orleans. In the midst of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill he’s since gone to work for British Petroleum, laying oil booms off the coast of Louisiana. Lauren hasn’t heard from him in weeks. She imagines Keller adrift in a rainbow of oil-slick waters, separated from his paternal responsibility by nautical miles, and she thinks, Fucking perfect: we’re both cleaning up someone else’s mess.

  The last few days on the road have been an experiment in cause and effect—the boy’s inability to communicate, his self-destructive behavior, his obsession with maps. In Kansas, when Lauren pried the road atlas from the boy’s hands, he banged his head against the passenger window. That’s when she bought him the bicycle helmet. When he wet himself in the tumult of a Colorado hailstorm, she put him in Pull-Ups and he’s worn them every day since. She’s ashamed to admit that for three days the boy has eaten only french fries, that for the past three hundred miles he’s been doped up on NyQuil.

  Wind buffets the truck, and the boy stirs in his sleep. Through the dark,
through her own ragged reflection, Lauren can picture the barren, windswept rangeland of eastern Idaho. She can picture her younger self too, stooping to pass through the barbed wires of a fence. Years ago, Lauren’s father brought Lauren and her sister, Desiree, to hike the route of the Gilmore-Pittsburgh Railroad—the ghost of a railroad, once connecting Idaho and Montana—and she thinks back to the rare find of a buried railroad tie, the smell of wet sagebrush, her father bending to touch the pink of a bitterroot flower.

  That day feels so long ago she wonders if it ever happened. Nine years have passed and now she’s back with sixty-four dollars in cash, a truck in her husband’s name, and a boy that isn’t hers. Yesterday she called her mother from a pay phone in Denver—their first conversation in six years—and for once her mother had the decency not to ask any questions. Lauren studies the boy in the wake of the interior lights. He doesn’t look like her husband but then people change. Lord, do they ever change.

  The Beaverheads are backlit by dawn when Lauren arrives in the town of Salmon. She drives down Main Street, the only road with a stoplight, taking in the changes. Savage Circle, the hamburger joint, is now a used-car lot. The old used-car lot is now a real estate office. The hospital is new, complete with a helicopter landing pad for Life Flights over the mountain to Missoula. She passes a Wonder Bread truck, then a flatbed hauling hay bales, and two barking dogs. On the hillside above town, houses begin to wake.

  Lauren’s sister calls twice a year—on Lauren’s birthday and Christmas Eve—and only now does Lauren understand Desiree’s concern. Their mother has become a recluse, and the property has gone steadily downhill: warped cedar shingles, rusted wrought-iron fence, flowerbeds usurped by star thistle. The front windows are covered in plastic from last winter. Two signs hang from the front door: FRESH EGGS $3 and NO SOLICITORS.

  The boy is awake. He has sleep in his eyes, a ketchup stain on his shirt. Lauren positions the letterman jacket over his shoulders and he wears it like a cape. She nearly closes his hand in the door when he reaches back for the road atlas.

  Her mother stands in the side yard, dressed in a mud-hemmed housecoat and muck boots, throwing feed to the chickens. Lauren waves, and her mother goes through the backdoor and reappears at the front. Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please—dirt-caked knuckles and a gray braid. Glasses hang from a gold chain around her neck. She raises the glasses and studies Lauren and the boy as if they’re a pair of Democrat campaigners, or worse: Mormon missionaries.

  “Well now,” she says at last, “this must be the child.”

  Lauren says, “Say hello, Jonah,” and the boy says, “Say hello, Jonah.”

  The house smells of onions and overcooked eggs. It appears in order, but Lauren knows it’s merely clutter in a clever arrangement—stacks of old magazines, baskets of yarn and crochet needles, crystal bowls filled with bank pens and buttons and pennies. Lauren prods the boy and he steps inside but stops at the entry rug, and for the first time she and the boy share a moment: neither wants to go any farther.

  Her mother turns on the television, and the boy’s head snaps forward. Cartoon voices cut the silence of the old house. She places a box of Cheerios on a pillow in front of the television, and the boy goes to it, sits, and digs his hand into the box.

  “Dry cereal,” Lauren says. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Her mother says, “When was the last time you ate something?” She measures Lauren’s waist with the eyes of a seamstress. “You’re skinny.”

  It isn’t a compliment, but Lauren says thank you. It takes everything she has, but she says what her mother wants to hear: “Thanks for having us on short notice.” And then, because it isn’t just Lauren but also the boy, she adds, “I really appreciate it.”

  After breakfast they drink tea, Lauren watching her mother and her mother watching the boy. “I know what you’re thinking,” Lauren says.

  “Oh? And what am I thinking?”

  “That I should have left him a long time ago.”

  Her mother takes a drink. The teacup rattles in the saucer. She’s aged in her voice and hands and both are shaky. “And now you’ve left Keller but taken his son?”

  The paradox is not lost on Lauren. What she doesn’t tell her mother is that Keller was the one who did the leaving. He called the move to New Orleans a temporary separation, but as the months passed their relationship didn’t tip toward reconciliation or divorce but evaporated into a state of apathy. Keller claimed he was living with his parents, but Lauren knew it was a lie even before she arrived in New Orleans. His mother took one look at the boy, balanced on Lauren’s hip, and apologized. She said she hadn’t heard from Keller since the oil spill and handed Lauren his forwarding address.

  Lauren drove across the Mississippi River to St. Bernard Parish, to a white house with sun-faded toys in the yard, Christmas lights still hung from the gutters. A mailbox shaped like a catfish—its mouth on a hinge—stood at the curb. Keller’s truck was parked in the driveway, a new F-150 they couldn’t afford. A woman came to the door.

  “No, Keller isn’t home,” she said. “He’ll be on the Gulf for another few weeks.”

  It was the way the woman said home, the way she answered the door in an oversized T-shirt and a pair of men’s boxers. A phone rang somewhere in the house, and the woman excused herself. By the time she returned, Lauren had unwired the key from behind the license plate of Keller’s truck and loaded the boy and their bags inside. She hadn’t intended to steal the truck, or the boy, but she wanted to take something away from Keller. It wasn’t until she reached the Texas border—a moment of clarity after the boy dropped her cell phone in a truck-stop toilet—that she realized she was truly alone. There was nothing, and no one, waiting for her in Galveston.

  “I had to bring Jonah,” Lauren says. “It was this or foster care.”

  The cuckoo clock chimes seven times on the hour. Lauren rubs both fists against her eyes. Her mother says, “And now what are you going to do?”

  “Stay and work through the summer, if it’s all right with you. I thought I’d start by calling Daniel Walker. Is he still working for the Forest?”

  “He’s married, Lauren. He has a family.”

  “Good, because I need a job, not a date for the prom.”

  “And I suppose you expect me to watch Jonah while you work?”

  “Just until Keller gets off the Gulf. Then he can come get his son.”

  They both look at the boy. The cereal box sits upended, crushed Cheerios dusting the carpet. He’s pulled the paperbacks from the bookshelf and stacked them on the floor, and now pencils across the cover of a Larry McMurtry novel. Lauren says the boy’s name, and her mother says, “He’s fine, Lauren. They’re only books.”

  “They’re Dad’s books.”

  “Your father isn’t alive to read them.”

  “Yes, Mom, I know.”

  “Mom,” the boy repeats. “Mom.”

  Lauren gets up from the table and sits cross-legged on the floor. She opens the boy’s road atlas and turns the page to Texas. “Here,” she says, pointing to Houston. “Your mother is here.” She points to herself. “Lauren.”

  The next morning Lauren drives to the Forest Service office to see Daniel Walker. She brings the boy along to prove a point to her mother. He’s sleepy and soft-limbed, and Lauren, wearing a pencil skirt and wedge sandals, struggles to carry him. Her fake snakeskin purse is weighted with baby wipes and Ziplocs of dry cereal, a juice box, Pull-Ups, and the boy’s road atlas. The boy wears footed pajamas, a milk mustache, and the bicycle helmet. What he lacks in normalcy, Lauren hopes to gain in Daniel’s sympathy.

  When she asks for Daniel, the receptionist looks her over and says, “You’ll have to wait right here while I call him.” Lauren’s silver bangles clank as she lowers the boy and raises her sunglasses. She pretends not to notice when the boy scatters a stack of pine beetle brochures, studies her fingernails as he pushes over a cardboard Smokey the Be
ar.

  The receptionist hangs up and gives Lauren a look, and Lauren says, “Isn’t he cute? He wants to be a wildlife biologist when he grows up.”

  Daniel meets her in the lobby dressed in khaki pants, a collared shirt, and a ball cap with a red fly hooked to the bill. He’s the wildland fire dispatcher for the Salmon-Challis National Forest. Lauren knows from their brief phone conversation that he’s responsible for organizing supplies and personnel for wildland fire efforts. He’s filled out through the chest and shoulders but retained the same boyish face, the same crooked gait he’s had since being thrown from a horse when they were sixteen.

  They hug, and the weight of his arms feels good on her shoulders. “You’ll have to excuse Gina for the high security,” he says. “She’s new around here.”

  Lauren looks behind her for the boy. He’s halfway down the hall, trying to open a locked door. “Jonah,” she says, “come and meet my old friend.” When the boy doesn’t respond, Lauren picks him up in a bear hug and carries him to Daniel’s office.

  The room is small and cramped with boxes and filing cabinets. The walls are covered in maps. Daniel says, “This is more of a closet. I work out of dispatch most of the time.” He taps the boy’s helmet. “Hey, kiddo. You going for a bike ride?”

  Lauren picks up a framed photo from the desk. A woman, small girl, and twin boys are dressed in matching Christmas sweaters. “Is this your family?”

  “That’s Carol, my wife. Anna’s six. Evan and Oliver are eight.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “They get that from my wife. How old is your son?”

  Lauren thinks back to the year of Keller’s affair, the same year as Hurricane Katrina. She considers telling Daniel that her husband fathered a child with another woman and named his trawler after Lauren as consolation. That subsequently, the Lauren Marie sank them into bankruptcy. She looks at the boy, standing at the wall tracing the contour lines of a topographic map with his finger. Lauren has never wanted children, but now she wants desperately to show something for the years of her marriage. “Jonah’s five,” she says. “We’ve just been so busy since he was born. You know how it is with kids.”