The Corrections

trustworthy brother …
    Gary had dropped into a crouch beside Alfred. “Dad,” he said, “I’m sorry it had to end this way. I love you and I’ll see you again soon.”
    “Well. Yurrr vollb. Yeaugh,” Alfred replied. He lowered his head and looked around with rank paranoia.
    “And you , my feckless sibling.” Gary spread his fingers, clawlike, on top of Chip’s head in what he apparently meant as a gesture of affection. “I’m counting on you to help out here.”
    “I’ll do my best,” Chip said with less irony than he’d aimed for.
    Gary stood up. “I’m sorry I ruined your breakfast, Mom. But I, for one, feel better for having got this off my chest.”
    “Why you couldn’t have waited till after the holiday,” Enid muttered.
    Gary kissed her cheek. “Call Hedgpeth tomorrow morning. Then call me and tell me what the plan is. I’m going to monitor this closely.”
    It seemed unbelievable to Chip that Gary could simply walk out of the house with Alfred on the floor and Enid’s Christmas breakfast in ruins, but Gary was in his most rational mode, his words had a formal hollowness, his eyes were evasive as he put on his coat and gathered up his bag and Enid’s bag of gifts for Philadelphia, because he was afraid. Chip could see it clearly now, behind the cold front of Gary’s wordless departure: his brother was afraid.
    As soon as the front door had closed, Alfred made his way to the bathroom.
    “Let’s all be happy,” Denise said, “that Gary got that off his chest and feels so much better now.”
    “No, he’s right,” Enid said, her eyes resting bleakly on the holly centerpiece. “Something has to change.”
    After breakfast the hours passed in the sickishness, the invalid waiting, of a major holiday. Chip in his exhaustion had trouble staying warm, but his face was flushed with the heat from the kitchen and the smell of baking turkey that blanketed the house. Whenever he entered his father’s field of vision, a smile of recognition and pleasure spread over Alfred’s face. This recognition might have had the character of mistaken identity if it hadn’t been accompanied by Alfred’s exclamation of Chip’s name. Chip seemed beloved to the old man. He’d been arguing with Alfred and deploring Alfred and feeling the sting of Alfred’s disapproval for most of his life, and his personal failures and his political views were, if anything, more extreme than ever now, and yet it was Gary who was fighting with the old man, it was Chip who brightened the old man’s face.
    At dinner he took the trouble to describe in some detail his activities in Lithuania. He might as well have been reciting the tax code in a monotone. Denise, normally a paragon of listening, was absorbed in helping Alfred with his food, and Enid had eyes only for her husband’s deficiencies. She flinched or sighed or shook her head at every spilled bite,every non sequitur. Alfred was quite visibly making her life a hell now.
    I’m the least unhappy person at this table , Chip thought.
    He helped Denise wash the dishes while Enid spoke to her grandsons on the telephone and Alfred went to bed.
    “How long has Dad been like this?” he asked Denise.
    “Like this? Just since yesterday. But he wasn’t great before that.”
    Chip put on a heavy coat of Alfred’s and took a cigarette outside. The cold was deeper than any he’d experienced in Vilnius. Wind rattled the thick brown leaves still clinging to the oaks, those most conservative of trees; snow squeaked beneath his feet. Near zero tonight , Gary had said. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey . Chip wanted to pursue the important question of suicide while he had a cigarette to enhance his mental performance, but his bronchi and nasal passages were so traumatized by cold that the trauma of smoke barely registered, and the ache in his fingers and ears—the damned rivets—was fast becoming unbearable. He gave up and hurried inside just as Denise was leaving.
    “Where are you going?” Chip asked.
    “I’ll be back.”
    Enid, by the fire in the living room, was gnawing at her lip with naked desolation. “You haven’t opened your presents,” she said.
    “Maybe in the morning,” Chip said.
    “I’m sure I didn’t get you anything you’ll like.”
    “It’s nice you got me anything.”
    Enid shook her head. “This wasn’t the Christmas I’d hoped for. Suddenly Dad can’t do a thing. Not one single thing.”
    “Let’s give him a drug holiday and