The Corrections

moralcertainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.
    It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression—to fight it with the truth.
    “Listen,” he said. “You were out there with Mom, playing soccer. Tell me if I’m right about this. Was she limping before she went inside?”
    For a moment, as Aaron roused himself from the bed, Gary believed that the truth would prevail. But the face Aaron showed him was a reddish-white raisin of revulsion and disbelief.
    “You’re horrible!” he said. “You’re horrible !” And he ran from the room.
    Ordinarily Gary wouldn’t have let Aaron get away with this. Ordinarily he would have battled his son all evening if that was what it took to extract an apology from him. But his mental markets—glycemic, endocrine, over-the-synapse—were crashing. He was feeling ugly, and to battle Aaron now would only make him uglier, and the sensation of ugliness was perhaps the leading Warning Sign.
    He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him.
    “I am not clinically depressed,” he told his reflection in the nearly dark bedroom window. With a great, marrow-taxing exertion of will, he stood up from Aaron’s bed and sallied forth to prove himself capable of having an ordinary evening.
    Jonah was climbing the dark stairs with Prince Caspian . “I finished the book,” he said.
    “Did you like it?”
    “I loved it,” Jonah said. “This is outstanding children’s literature. Asian made a door in the air that people walkedthrough and disappeared. They went out of Narnia and back into the real world.”
    Gary dropped into a crouch. “Give me a hug.”
    Jonah draped his arms on him. Gary could feel the looseness of his youthful joints, the cublike pliancy, the heat radiating through his scalp and cheeks. He would have slit his own throat if the boy had needed blood; his love was immense in that way; and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he was also coalition-building. Securing a tactical ally for his team.
    What this stagnating economy needs , thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman Gary R. Lambert, is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin .
    In the kitchen Caroline and Caleb were slouched at the table drinking Coke and eating potato chips. Caroline had her feet up on another chair and pillows beneath her knees.
    “What should we do for dinner?” Gary said.
    His wife and middle son traded glances as if this were the stick-in-the-mud sort of question he was famous for. From the density of potato-chip crumbs he could see they were well on their way to spoiled appetites.
    “Mixed grill, I guess,” said Caroline.
    “Oh, yeah, Dad, do a mixed grill!” Caleb said in a tone mistakable for either irony or enthusiasm.
    Gary asked if there was meat.
    Caroline stuffed chips into her mouth and shrugged.
    Jonah asked permission to build a fire.
    Gary, taking ice from the freezer, granted it.
    Ordinary evening. Ordinary evening.
    “If I put the camera over the table,” Caleb said, “I’ll get part of the dining room, too.”
    “You miss the whole nook, though,” Caroline said. “If it’s over the back door, you can sweep both ways.”
    Gary shielded himself with the door of the liquor cabinet while he poured four ounces of gin onto ice.
    “‘Alt. eighty-five’?” Caleb read from his catalogue.
    “That means the camera can look almost straight down.”
    Still shielded by the cabinet door, Gary took a hefty warmish gulp. Then, closing the cabinet, he held up the glass in case anyone cared to see what a relatively modest drink he’d poured himself.
    “Hate to break it to you,” he said, “but surveillance is out. It’s not appropriate as a hobby.”
    “Dad, you said it was OK as long as I stayed interested.”
    “I said I would think about it.”
    Caleb shook his head vehemently. “No! You didn’t! You said I could do it as long as I didn’t get bored.”
    “That is exactly what you said,” Caroline confirmed with an unpleasant smile.
    “Yes, Caroline, I’m sure you heard every word. But we’re not putting this kitchen under surveillance. Caleb, you do not have my permission to make those