Overthrow by Caleb Crain

Author:Caleb Crain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

6.

Blades of grass trembled as they were struck by the rain, like tines plucked by the rotor of a music box. It was warm, for Thanksgiving. A fecund and unpretty day. Maybe winter was going to be replaced by a rainy season, Matthew thought, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Rain seemed to make the world gentle and indirect.

Fosco, the three-year-old yellow lab that belonged to his parents, suddenly lost patience with walking on Matthew’s left and crossed in front of him, surprising him with the purposive force with which she yanked against the leash. She padded obliviously through and across a stream of rainwater purling in the gutter and clambered up into the lawn that they happened to be walking beside. There she snorted three times, burying her snout deep in the wet grass with each whiff before lowering her hips and affixing the seal of her satisfaction.

As Matthew waited, drops of rainwater wavered and associated on the brim of his cap. In case she was about to answer one call of nature with another, he touched the folded plume of plastic bag in his back pocket, as if he were doing so absentmindedly, the plastic constituting the flag of his good intentions as a dog walker in the neighborhood.

He had left Leif asleep, unfolded in the bed that he himself had used to sleep in as a child. The room itself wasn’t Matthew’s anymore. Years ago he had prised out the thumbtacks that had held up his movie posters and his mother had repainted. A framed print of a peach-and-blue-colored lighthouse now hung above the spot where his desk had been. The desk had moved into what had once been his brother’s bedroom, next door, which was now his mother’s office. His brother’s bedroom had been repurposed, and his had been “staged,” like the homes of his mother’s clients if they moved before she was able to find a purchaser—lightened of its memories, furnished with an almost impersonal representation of habitability. The redecorating was a way for his mother to pretend to herself that she didn’t mind that her sons had left and a way for her to make a show of convincing them that she didn’t mind.

The bed that had used to be his brother’s had gone to the attic, which had been the playroom when he and his brother were little, and hadn’t changed, except for a dormer window, which had never shut right and according to their mother had been letting in bats. It had had to be replaced.

“Would Leif like to sleep in the attic?” his mother had asked, the night before, in the car, when she and Matthew’s father had picked Leif and him up at the train station.

“No, he can have my bed,” Matthew had replied, “and I’ll set up the air bed on the floor. You still have the air bed, don’t you?”

He had been aware of his father listening to the conversation from the driver’s seat; he had been aware of Leif, beside him, listening just as carefully.

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