GRAY MATTER by Gary Braver

Author:Gary Braver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781429971249
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-04-01T10:00:00+00:00

33

“D-d-did they love each other?”

“Of course they loved each other,” Richard growled. “What the hell kind of a question is that? They were crazy about each other.”

“I was j-just wondering.”

“You must remember them.”

“Kind of.”

“And if they were alive today, they’d want your ass back in school.”

They had been through this countless times since he quit last year, and Richard looked for every opportunity to nag him about it.

Brendan continued driving without comment, hoping that Richard would just run out of steam. They were coming back from Richard’s men’s club where he’d spend the afternoons playing cards with some of the other Barton old-timers.

“Why don’t you go back in the fall, for cryin’ out loud?” he asked. “You’re not going to get anywhere waiting tables. You’re too damn smart for that. I don’t want to see you waste your life.”

“I d-d-don’t like school.”

“You didn’t give it a try. I almost never saw you crack open a book, except all that poetry stuff.”

Brendan didn’t respond.

“You finish school, go to college, and get yourself a degree like all the other kids. Your parents did. Jeez, if they were still alive they’d kill me for letting you quit. You should do it for their sake, for cryin’ out loud.”

“M-maybe.” Brendan’s mother had been a defense lawyer and his father was a librarian. And, as Richard often reminded him, they were “education-minded” people.

“Otherwise, you’re gonna end up like me, working with your hands and killing yourself for every buck you make.” He held up his hands, now knobbed and bent with arthritis.

“But you liked being a plumber.”

Richard humpfed. “Yeah, I did. But tell that to my joints and lower lumbar.” He rolled his head the way he did when the arthritis in his neck flared up. Richard once said that he had lived most of his life without pain—it had been saved for the end.

Brendan turned down Main Street of Barton. To the right was Angie’s Diner. For a second, he felt his head throb. “Was she pretty?”

“Who?”

“My m-mother.”

“How could you not remember? She was beautiful.” There was a catch in his voice. Richard was Brendan’s mother’s father. “She looked like her mother.”

Brendan gave him a side-glance. Richard was crying. He had not seen Richard cry since his wife, Betty, died some years ago. He envied Richard, because Brendan could not recall ever crying. Maybe it was the medication his doctor had him on. Or maybe he was just dead. “I remember her,” he said.

“You should with your memory, for cryin’ out loud.”

But the truth was that Brendan only recalled his parents during the last few years of their lives. Before that—before he was seven—he drew a near blank, including nothing of his earlier years; yet he could recite most of what he had read or seen and could recall great sweeps of recent experiences in uncannily vivid details. It was as if his life before age seven didn’t exist.

“I w-w-wish I’d known them better.”

Richard nodded and wiped his eyes.

I wish I could cry like you, Brendan thought.

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