The Namesake by Steven Parlato

Author:Steven Parlato [Parlato, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4405-5458-2
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

“Tell me about the baby.”

I’m as shocked by the question as she is. It’s not what I’d intended.

Her breath comes in a weak shiver, and I brace myself for Mom volume. But when she starts to talk, it’s soft, like a bedtime story.

“We never wanted you to know … ”

“What? That I was the replacement?”

“Evan, that’s preposterous.”

“Evan Take Two?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Baby Do-over?”

Bingo. She’s ticked.

“It is nearly three o’clock in the morning, and you have no right barging in here to accuse me.” Standing by the bedroom door like a hostile Walmart greeter, she waits for me to leave. When I don’t, she sighs. “I am not having this conversation.”

I sit on the edge of her bed and say, “Yeah. I think you are.”

“We didn’t raise you to be so disrespectful.”

I’ve had it. “What has being respectful ever done for me? Made me invisible? Easier to deceive?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you not get that it matters to me — that you and Dad lied to me all these years, never told me I had a brother? You called me JUNIOR for God’s sake!”

“You didn’t need to know.”

“How can you say that?”

Crossing to the bed, straightening the comforter, she sits beside me.

“We were just trying to protect you.”

“Well you did a pretty sucky job.”

“ENOUGH!”

That had to hurt. Can you fracture a tonsil? It takes a minute — and several labored swallows — before she continues.

“Okay, fine. We’ve failed you as parents. Where do we go from here?”

God, not the self-pity card. I roll my eyes.

“I asked you a question, Evan.”

“What, ‘Where do we go from here?’ Well, I guess my answer is back to bed. Talking to you is pointless.”

I’m halfway down the hall when she calls out. There’s a quality to her voice I recognize immediately. It’s how she used to sound when I was little and got too close to the stove, the curb, the stranger. Panic.

Peering into her room, I expect to find her still on the bed. She’s not; for an anxious moment, I’m stumped. Is this a joke? An ambush? Is she lurking under the bed like a Boogeymom?

The closet light’s on. I find her inside, perched on the stepladder at the back. As she climbs down, I see the photo album pressed to her chest.

“Want to see?”

In that instant, she’s a seven-year-old offering her art project. Her whole face trembles as she approaches, like her features are going through a random shuffling. The album’s thin — about half as thick as the phone book — but the way she carries it suggests significant weight. I take it. In that moment of transfer, her face settles into a single expression. It looks like gratitude.

She emerges from closet shadow, and the illusion implodes; she goes from grammar school to geriatric. Instinctively taking her arm, I lead her to the bed. We sit side by side, neither of us daring to speak or look at the album between us.

Finally, as headlights span the bedroom wall, she lifts memory’s cover and — careful not to look inside just yet — she speaks.

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