Collected Stories by Raymond Carver

Author:Raymond Carver [Author, Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

from

Where I’m Calling From

To Tess Gallagher

We can never know what to want, because, living

only one life, we can neither compare it with our

previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Milan Kundera,

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Boxes

My mother is packed and ready to move. But Sunday afternoon, at the last minute, she calls and says for us to come eat with her. “My icebox is defrosting,” she tells me. “I have to fry up this chicken before it rots.” She says we should bring our own plates and some knives and forks. She’s packed most of her dishes and kitchen things. “Come on and eat with me one last time,” she says. “You and Jill.”

I hang up the phone and stand at the window for a minute longer, wishing I could figure this thing out. But I can’t. So finally I turn to Jill and say, “Let’s go to my mother’s for a good-bye meal.”

Jill is at the table with a Sears catalogue in front of her, trying to find us some curtains. But she’s been listening. She makes a face. “Do we have to?” she says. She bends down the corner of a page and closes the catalogue. She sighs. “God, we been over there to eat two or three times in this last month alone. Is she ever actually going to leave?”

Jill always says what’s on her mind. She’s thirty-five years old, wears her hair short, and grooms dogs for a living. Before she became a groomer, something she likes, she used to be a housewife and mother. Then all hell broke loose. Her two children were kidnapped by her first husband and taken to live in Australia. Her second husband, who drank, left her with a broken eardrum before he drove their car through a bridge into the Elwha River. He didn’t have life insurance, not to mention property-damage insurance. Jill had to borrow money to bury him, and then—can you beat it?—she was presented with a bill for the bridge repair. Plus, she had her own medical bills. She can tell this story now. She’s bounced back. But she has run out of patience with my mother. I’ve run out of patience, too. But I don’t see my options.

“She’s leaving day after tomorrow,” I say. “Hey, Jill, don’t do any favors. Do you want to come with me or not?” I tell her it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I’ll say she has a migraine. It’s not like I’ve never told a lie before.

“Pm coming,” she says. And like that she gets up and goes into the bathroom, where she likes to pout.

We’ve been together since last August, about the time my mother picked to move up here to Longview from California. Jill tried to make the best of it. But my mother pulling into town just when we were trying to get our act together was nothing either of us had bargained for. Jill said it reminded her of the situation with her first husband’s mother.

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