Eat Only When You're Hungry by Lindsay Hunter

Author:Lindsay Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Greg took GJ camping, encouraged by Deb; now that they were living in Greensboro they hardly saw the boy. It was high time for a visit. And Marie had been telling them things. How she came home to a party in the condo when GJ thought she’d be away the whole weekend at a new boyfriend’s house. How GJ had apologized, how there were cigarette burns in her curtains, how he’d been high, Greg, high as a kite but swore it was just weed. How he’d lost his job at the food court, something about a new manager coming on who had it in for GJ. How he slept all day but was awake all night, like a cat, jittery and talkative and strange. How he had only three months to go before graduation but he’d been skipping. Greg listened to all of it over the phone, read her e-mails with their all-caps urgency. It felt like a luxury to him, this period of messiness. Kids did drugs, kids acted out, kids tested their parents’ limits. It was all part of it. He hadn’t been allowed the same freedom; his mother had kicked him out when he was sixteen for calling her a drunk, had taken him back in only when Mrs. Helen phoned her and said it was time for him to come home. And only then because it embarrassed her, the neighbor knowing the family business. She had come to the door in one of her best suits, hugged him when Mrs. Helen summoned him from her kitchen, where he’d been gripping a cold glass of lemonade, hoping she’d go away. Then at home she had gone back to ignoring him, her silent treatment as thick as the cigarette smoke that trailed her from room to room.

So GJ had it good, in Greg’s estimation. He could fuck up all he wanted to, at least for a while. No one would be kicking him out. Instead he would take his son on a camping trip, something they’d done plenty of times back when GJ was a Boy Scout.

He bought a brand-new tent, one with a skylight so they could see the stars from their sleeping bags, which he also bought brand-new: thick, luxuriant cocoons that guaranteed warmth in temperatures as low as fifteen below zero, though they’d be camping in the Panhandle in April. Headlamps; hiking boots (GJ’s special-ordered size fifteens); packets of grub in stew, pot pie, and chili flavors; a paperback of ghost stories that was by the register; and a watch for GJ that featured a small compass just above the 6.

He flew in to the Orlando airport, which always felt like a theme park in its own right, dazed parents walking behind children skipping and shrieking and eating sticky lollipops or candy necklaces, expensive shops featuring authentic key lime candies or sugared orange peels or cartoon mouse keychains, everyone moving in a slow herd as the blue sky and white sun poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

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