Prodigals by Greg Jackson

Author:Greg Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713751
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

(III)

You are twenty-nine. You are going home. This is happening. Kick and scream if you will. Carp all the way to the airport. Complain to your friends, to Anita. Such a drag. A duty, really, and joyless. No, you love your mother, she’s just impossible, deluded. The way parents are. Such lame-o’s, irredentists lost to an irrecoverable past. You look a bit bedraggled, you must admit. A bit showily causal in your knockabout jeans and Keds. No sense getting dressed up for your mother, but it’s like you’re trying to prove you’ve left. Prove you don’t belong. And yes, you’ve been away too long, it’s true. A year, can it be? And yes, everyone else in what was once your family now has a different family of his own. Meanwhile your mother’s life has shrunk to the space of three stories she tells herself not exactly riveted to the truth: that she and your father continue to enjoy a spiritual bond since the split; that she is happy, all things considered; that you and she are a pair, alike in loneliness, although you often have girlfriends whom she continues to conceive of as very close women friends.

It rains your first days home. You sit with your mother in the back room and she says she’s been feeling close to God lately. We talk, she tells you and says He put her on her own to know Him better. Water runs down the frosted glass. You should have more conversations with real people, you say. You know the sort: flesh-and-blood, visible, prone to unfortunate differences of opinion. I never knew what profound companionship I could find in God, she says. And what you want to say is that a person can’t find companionship in an echo, that she is listening to her echo and the thing about an echo is it will never surprise you. But you say nothing. You can rip the bandages off everyone else’s private wounds, not hers.

Your father and me, Jesse, we just wanted different things.

Anita told me to tell you to date more.

It’s nice you have such nice friends, she says.

The rain taps out your silence. On your third day home you escape Ma.

The weather has broken and hot sun floods the shadeless downtown. The heat culls moisture from the hollows. You pause at the old department store. Through the windows you can see the dais and pulpit where Amy’s father used to preach. People you don’t know are gathered at a card table with coffees and notepads—congregants, strangers, new stewards of what was once yours—and you have the brief urge to go in and tell them to stop, that you and Amy have explored this blind alley and can tell them the dimensions if they like. It is a kind of vertigo you feel, a queasy lurch at the precipice of collapsed time, seeing those things continue on from which your own life has diverged. And it reminds you of watching the high school girls

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