The Whore's Child

wasn’t like he’d ever thought they
were
bad people.
    â€œYour Uncle Bert’s a pain in the ass, but he’s not a bad guy either.”
    Lin nodded. Actually, he liked his uncle the best of all his father’s relatives, though his mother was right: his whiny voice was just like a girl’s.
    â€œIt wouldn’t kill you to pretend you liked them, is all I’m saying.”
    Lin considered this. His impression was that he
had
been pretending this very thing.
    â€œJust because your mother doesn’t like somebody doesn’t mean you can’t,” his father continued. “Just because she thinks she’s better than everybody doesn’t mean you have to.”
    â€œOkay,” Lin said, suddenly on the verge of tears.
    â€œSo, is she seeing anybody?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œWho.”
    â€œMom? No.”
    â€œShe ever say anything about me?”
    â€œShe says she doesn’t want to be married to a bartender.”
    He nodded. “Well, that’s a switch. Her favorite people all used to be bartenders. That was before you, of course.”
    Back inside the house, his mother called to him from the kitchen. “Is he gone?”
    â€œNo,” Lin said, peering through the blinds.
    â€œWhat’s he doing?”
    â€œJust sitting there.”
    â€œHe’ll get tired of it,” she said.
    GHOSTS
    Lin understood, sort of, about the past—for instance, that his mother was different before he was born. True, it was odd to think of her as somebody whose favorite people were bartenders, but to Lin, this was further evidence that his dramatic entrance into the world had changed everything. It felt, sometimes, as if the world must’ve been patiently waiting for him to get born so that
real
things could start happening—kind of like the difference between the drills at school and an actual fire. He knew that things could and did happen even if he wasn’t there, but he still had the impression that the truly important events tended to occur only when he was there to witness them. Last year, for example, when his parents argued late into the night about maybe moving to Connecticut where there were good schools and his mother could make better money teaching, Lin always woke up and listened to their voices coming up through the heat register. It was possible, he supposed, that he’d slept through other arguments, but he imagined that by their very nature (as witnessed by the fact that he’d not been there to take them in) they would not be essential to his understanding or survival. Surely life played that fair, at least. The world was there for him to learn from and learn about. Otherwise, what was the point?
    True, his faith that the world was considerate of him was occasionally undermined, like when his father finally moved into the apartment above the barbershop. Lin had felt that he’d probably missed some important event or discussion that would’ve provided a bridge to the moment when his father appeared at breakfast with his suitcase to explain that he’d be going away for a while. And when he tossed the suitcase into the trunk and drove off in the car, Lin felt even more powerfully the existence of some ghost scene from which he’d been mysteriously and unfairly excluded. He knew that in his mother’s opinion the stupid Harts were holding his father back, whereas according to his father, his mother was a “daddy’s girl”—complaints he’d heard voiced through the heat register. But what had happened to bring things to this current pass? He couldn’t conjure the missing scene, no matter how hard he tried, which begged a question: What if the world
didn’t
play fair? What if it didn’t care whether he learned its lessons or not?
    One Saturday morning in July, Lin’s mother decided it was time for his haircut, and they’d walked downtown, she dropping Lin off at the barbershop so she could run some errands. As he waited for his turn in the chair, Lin tried to imagine his father’s apartment on the second floor, a place he never had visited. He’d asked about it once, but his father had told him not to worry, he wouldn’t be there that long. As a result, the apartment was somehow less real than it would’ve been had he been allowed to see it; though Lin had no idea why this should be so, nevertheless it felt true. On television he’d seen movie