The Whore's Child

suitcase on the curb as if he’d suddenly lost his grip on the handle, “you’d rather take a cab? If you do, just say so, because there’s one right across the street.”
    â€œI thought we’d agreed you weren’t going to meet us.”
    â€œReally?” he said, tossing the bag into the open trunk and then slamming it shut. “You thought we agreed about something?”
    Lin sat in the backseat, his mother up front with his father. “How’s Linwood the Third?” his father said. “Still convinced he’s better than everybody?”
    â€œDon’t start,” his mother warned him.
    â€œDaddy’s little girl,” his father chuckled.
    To Lin’s surprise, his mother didn’t say a word. In fact, she didn’t speak again until they pulled up to the curb behind Mr. Christie’s pickup. “Good Lord,” she said under her breath. “He’s still here.”
    â€œWell,” his father replied, “that’s love for you.”
    This remark made no sense at all to Lin, who wasn’t sure he’d heard it right.
    â€œYou want me to get rid of him?” his father offered.
    â€œNo. I just want him to be finished.”
    â€œWell, I’m going to take my son out for a plate of spaghetti, if you have no objections,” he said. “You’re welcome to come too, if you like.”
    â€œWhat I’d like,” she replied, getting out of the car, “is to go upstairs, climb into bed, fall asleep and wake up far away.” Lin knew exactly what she intended to do when they were gone. She would put Jo Stafford on the record player and let “The Wayward Wind” play over and over.
    â€œThings don’t have to be like this, Evelyn,” his father called, watching until the door grunted shut behind her. Then he swiveled around to look at Lin. “You want to come up front?”
    Lin shrugged. Nobody, he’d noticed, ever asked him about anything that had any consequence.
    â€œFine,” his father said. “Stay there, then.”
    Actually, Lin realized, that wasn’t quite true. Mr. Christie not only asked his opinion but also listened carefully to it. Why then, when at that precise moment the man came around the corner of the house, balancing the big wooden ladder expertly on his shoulder, his hand half raised in a good-natured wave, did Lin pretend not to see him?
    SPAGHETTI
    They were no sooner seated in Rigazzi’s than Lin’s favorite waitress, the one who enjoyed giving his father a hard time, came over. “I was beginning to think you’d died, Slick,” she said, one hand on an ample hip. “You never come in anymore.”
    His father pretended to read the menu. “Well, Jolene, I keep running into people I don’t like,” his father said, indicating the far end of the restaurant where Lin’s Uncle Brian sat eating spaghetti with his family.
    â€œSpeaking of which,” Jolene said, “he wants to know if you’d like to join them.”
    â€œYeah?” his father said. “Tell him I know how much he’d like to spoil my dinner, but I’m not going to let him.”
    â€œI’ll say no such thing,” she assured him.
    â€œSuit yourself,” his father said amiably. “I’ll have the—”
    â€œRigatoni and sausage,” Jolene finished for him.
    â€œRigatoni and sausage,” his father confirmed as she wrote it down.
    Now she raised an eyebrow in Lin’s direction. When he opened his mouth to speak, she said, “Spaghetti and meatballs,” wrote that down and then snatched the two menus. “I could make other predictions, too, but I’d just depress myself.”
    Lin wouldn’t have minded joining his Uncle Brian’s family. His cousin Audrey, who was fifteen, had breasts and was about the prettiest girl Lin had ever seen—so pretty, in fact, that he couldn’t even hold it against her that she’d never spoken a kind word to him. His cousin Mackey, who was two years older, did play Wiffle ball with him, but only on the condition that he got to bat first, which meant in effect that Lin never got to bat at all, since he could never get Mackey out. Uncle Brian’s problem, according to Lin’s father, was that he was a blowhard, and in his own opinion, Mackey was well on his way to becoming another.
    â€œYou didn’t know that, did you,” his