Everybody's Son
Page 31
He stopped at the only red light in town, and as he sat there, he saw it: Sometime tonight, he would propose it, maybe over dinner, maybe when they’d returned home and she was preparing the couch for him. Come with me, Mam, he would say. Now that I’ve found you, it would be unbearable for me to leave you again. It would destroy me not to have you in my life. And I do have to go back, because I have a race to win. I wouldn’t care so much for myself, but you see, there are a lot of people who are counting on me. There are kids who dropped out of college to work on my campaign. There are old ladies in nursing homes who have sent me five dollars each month. And here’s the thing, Mam. I think I have it in me to be a good governor. You know, people always want their politicians to be father figures. I won’t be. But what I think I can be is a damn good son. A responsible heir, a sober custodian of what belongs to them. Because it ain’t my state or my dad’s. It’s theirs. And you know who reminded me of that, Mam? You did. It’s knowing that I can learn to be a good son to you that gives me the confidence to think I can do this job.
Anton smiled to himself as he drove past the fields that his forefathers may have tilled, and toward his nana’s house.
As Anton makes the sudden sharp turn onto the gravel road that leads to his grandmother’s house, the sun is beginning to protest its dying. It shoots its anguish into the sky, sparks of gold and orange and a lurid purple. The melodrama of the sky contrasts with the placid, dark green fields. The Lexus inches along the gravel road, not wanting to miss the driveway that leads to the house. Anton turns left onto the driveway, and the first thing he notices is absence. The absence of Mam’s car. His heart sinks a bit, following the trajectory of the sun. He peers out of the windshield and notices the house is dark. She’s not home. She’s not home. It’s almost eight o’clock on a Sunday night, and she’s not home. He kicks himself for not having stopped at the diner, but she had told him that her shift ended at five-thirty. And surely she wasn’t working on a Sunday night.
Well, nothing to do but wait. She could be anywhere, really. Gone to the movies. Gone to an evening church service. Visiting one of Nana’s friends at the hospital. He steps out of the car and stretches his stiff back, pulling his arms above his head, flattening his palms so that they appear to hold up the weight of the sky. The gravel crunches under his feet as he walks toward the house in his expensive calf-leather shoes. He takes the porch steps in one stride, and even though he knows she’s not home, he knocks on the door. There is no sound or movement. He waits for a moment and then heads back down from the porch.
Out in the yard, he listens to the sound of the quiet. It is loud, deafening, and for a moment, unbearable. And then his ear sinks into it and it pleases him. As does the sight of the powerless sun, vanquished at last, dimming in the horizon. Now, finally, there is a breeze, and it brings with it welcome perfumes from the honeysuckle growing in the yard, and from the other flowers, flowers he doesn’t know the names of but suspects that his mother does. He unbuttons the top button on his shirt and bends his elbows as if he’s doing the chicken dance in order to air out his damp armpits. He opens the door of the car to get in, but the seductions of late evening win and he shuts it again. He leans against the vehicle, his legs crossed at the ankles, and waits. His right foot digs into the gravel, sending up a small puff of dust that settles on his shoe. He taps his toe, following a rhythm he is unaware of. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap.
He is unaccustomed to waiting, unaccustomed to being idle, unaccustomed to being undistracted by cell phones or computers or events and people competing for his time. He is not used to being entranced by the scent of flowers, by a sky that is fresh out of a Turner painting, by a breeze that is ruffling his hair, a breeze whose tickle he feels deep inside his chest. His rising, swelling chest.
He has never felt this at ease in the world. Here, alone, outside his mother’s home, he is content to wait. Wait for her to return home, his mam, his blood, his future. Because it is true. Together, they will script his future. He almost laughs out loud at the man he was just earlier today—the cautious, timid straw man who fretted about being caught by the media, who was shackled to the burdensome pillars of duty and obligation, so utterly different from responsibility, which is freely chosen. He listens to the footsteps of the approaching dark, and he sees now how the orchestra plays in the natural world, how effortless the coordination of wind is with sky and sun and dusky fields. This is what he wants for himself, all the elements of his life coming together. And if he has this wish granted occasionally, here and there and now and then, he will still be the luckiest of men.
And so Anton Vesper Coleman waits. Under a darkening sky. Outside his mother’s house. Leaning against his car. With one foot tapping a melody only he can hear. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
Tap.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THRITY UMRIGAR is the author of six novels—The Story Hour, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for almost twenty years, she is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and the 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. The Armington professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, Umrigar lives in Cleveland.
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ALSO BY THRITY UMRIGAR
The Story Hour
The World We Found
The Weight of Heaven
If Today Be Sweet
First Darling of the Morning
The Space Between Us
Bombay Time
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EVERYBODY’S SON. Copyright © 2017 by Thrity Umrigar. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover illustration by Andy Bridge / Alamy Stock Photo
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition June 2017 ISBN 9780062442253
Print ISBN 978-0-06244224-6
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