A Gate At The Stairs

Author:Lorrie Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-12-10T23:00:00+00:00

VI

My brother and my father picked me up at the bus station, figuring I’d have a lot of stuff. Robert was wearing his graduation gown but carrying his cap.

“Well, you don’t have that much,” said my father, puzzled.

“I put a lot in storage,” I said. I tugged at Robert’s gown. “Hey, congratulations.”

“It’s more of an accomplishment than you may realize,” he said, abashed.

“What time is the ceremony?”

“Not until two.”

“And you put on that gown already?”

“You bet.”

“We have already taken a thousand pictures,” mused my dad.

“You didn’t answer my e-mail,” said my brother.

“What e-mail?” I asked.

“The last one I sent you!”

“You told me to ignore it.”

“No, not that one. The one after that!”

I was slowly remembering that I had archived it for later.

“Is your address still bassface-at-isp-dot-com?” he continued.

I always believed my e-mail address was clever and hip until I heard it said aloud. “It is. Jeez, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” I would change the subject. “How are you?”

“Great!”

“Really? Nobody’s great!”

“Well, it’s not great with a capital G. It’s actually g-r-a-t-e. That may not be so good.”

“No, it may not be. How did that happen?”

“I got grated on a curb.”

“Ha! Did he ever,” said my dad.

“Did you just make that up?” I asked my brother.

“No,” he said, smiling and climbing into the truck. “I’ve been working on it for weeks. ”

“Weeks?”

“Well, not weeks. Months, actually.” He was working hard to sound upbeat and had landed on bizarrely merry.

“Did you leave that Suzuki of yours back in Troy?” inserted my father as we were driving off.

“Yes. I did.”

“Too bad!” said my brother. The topic of the lost e-mail had too much regret and belatedness attached to it and was no fun. Unlike the motorbike. “I wanted to see you buzz around the ceremony this afternoon. It would cause a sensation!”

“That’s just what I want to do.” I stared out the window of the truck. Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses were sprawled across the farm fields.

At home I had to help my mother dress, in the room she called “the store.” Here she would stack up boxes of apparel that she had mail-ordered but not tried on to see whether she would keep them or send them back. When she was ready she would go through and open them one by one, but until then they stayed in the store-which was in essence a kind of mail room.

“Gail?” my dad called up for my mom.

“We’re in the store!” she called back, and I helped her try on something I thought would be fine, and then yanked the tags off for her. “Send the rest back,” I said. “But wait-what is this?” There was a beautiful black hat with a feather sticking straight up and a sash dangling down the side.

“That’s not for a graduation.”

“No, it’s not. Unless you’re the one graduating: then you could flip the sash as you walked across the stage and blow a whistle with the feather between your thumbs.”

“It’s for something, though,” she said, holding it with more affection than was seemly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.