The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff

Author:Joshua Braff [Braff, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780452286702
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Lucky

Lulled and foggy from needle number three, they tell me it’s time to go home. My parents in the front seat, me in the back, I watch the speedometer flutter near twenty and listen to the drone of my father’s haughty words. The sermon reflects on what he calls the “distance” my mother’s created with her newfound life—a distance first hatched, he suggests, the morning she met her “little” mentor. Enunciating as if speaking to a room full of toddlers, the critique raises the question of how someone so attuned to familial dysfunction can justify “vanishing” from her very own home.

“Vanishing?” my mother asks. “Twice a week I’m home after nine. The rest of the time I—”

“Does Nathaniel get home before nine, ten at night?”

“I’m not having this conversation now.”

“Consistency,” he says. “Tell me if I’m wrong, Doctor. Being there. Being home when they’re home. This is motherhood.”

“You, Abram? You want consistency for your children?” She lets out an incredulous chuckle. “Is that what you said? Consistency?”

He stares at her and tries to control his jaw. “Are you cute now? A little act? He tells you you’re witty, doesn’t he? He tells you you’re cute? Before he makes you stay after class and—”

“Don’t!”

There’s a blip of silence before she turns to face me. Our eyes meet briefly and she looks away, out her window—wanting to stop the flood. “Jacob,” she says, as if reminding him I’m there.

“Yes?”

“How does it feel right now, honey?” I look down at my cast and then up at her. She rests her head against the back of the seat and her curly brown hair is flattened. How does it feel? How does it feel to be here, is what she means. Stuck back here, in earshot of this ugly privacy. How does that feel? How does that feel, Jacob? To be so lucky.

My father flips the radio on and turns it right off. He shakes his head a few times and leans into her ear. “Do you know you have a six-year-old boy?”

“Stop it.”

“Just answer me.”

“We both do.”

“But I work,” he says. “I make a living, remember? Remember?”

“And I raised babies.”

“You’re not done yet.”

“I never said I was.”

“I’d take over for ya, Claire, but what would we eat? Where would we live? I never signed up to be a housewife. Did I? It wasn’t my role.”

“I did it for years and I still do it.”

“When? How? How could you still do it?”

“Every second I’m home.”

“It’s not the way we discussed it.”

“Discussed it . . . when?”

“In Rockridge. I know where we were sitting, what we were eating. Asher was a baby. Early November of 1964.”

“Nineteen sixty-four? We had a conversation in 1964?”

“So that makes it less valid? Because you say sixty-four as if it was . . . the turn of the century?”

She looks down at her hands, her head shaking. “I’ve never stopped you from growing,” she says. “Never.”

He pokes himself in the chest. “I kept my part of the deal. You didn’t. Tuna

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