The Altruists by Andrew Ridker

Author:Andrew Ridker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

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Arthur’s devotion to Piggy’s Smokehouse, a barbecue dive in Midtown St. Louis, rivaled, in sheer religiosity, any time-honored culinary tradition he could think of. The Passover seder plate. Catholics and their wafers. Yes, when Arthur imagined roping his children back into his life, he pictured it beginning at Piggy’s, the three of them around a picnic table laughing hot, piquant laughs, their tongues alight with barbecue tang.

Piggy’s did barbecue the right way, which is to say the Memphis way and not, crucially, the St. Louis way, which dispatched with the dry rub and slow smoking that made the whole endeavor worthwhile in the first place. The restaurant was a sanctuary for Arthur, a place of refuge and escape, an off-campus counterpart to the African Studies Library. (Francine, the only semi-observant Jew in the family, had in her Conservative upbringing missed the chance to develop a taste for pork. She loathed the smell, and never once stepped foot inside the place. Arthur felt differently. He was a Jew in temperament but not practice, who would’ve deemed himself agnostic were it not for the incontrovertible fact that he’d gestated in a Jewish womb.) Piggy’s opened in 1996, a few months ahead of the Alters’ move to St. Louis. But it had been hungrily accepted by the city, and so vintage was its charm that for years Arthur believed the place preceded him by decades. When eventually he realized that it didn’t, that its history in the city could be tracked alongside his, he came to think of Piggy’s and its development—the opening of second and third locations, the menu’s gradual inclusion of combination plates and Frito pies—as a mirror for his family’s trajectory. Moving to St. Louis, raising his children. Seeing them through college and into adulthood. In bringing Ethan and Maggie there now, he hoped they would remember the many afternoons spent under its wood beams; that the pork and the corn and the slaw in their waxed-paper-lined baskets would invoke the unbridled potential of grade school, familial warmth, the vulnerability of youth.

But when they stepped into the unassuming restaurant, its walls adorned with logo merch, Arthur wasn’t met with the reaction that he’d hoped for. Maggie exhaled through her teeth, the hiss of pressurized air brakes popping open their valves.

“Piggy’s?” she said. “Really?”

“What’s wrong?”

Maggie’s eyebrows arched. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” he said. “Come on. Let’s grab a table.”

His son sat beside him, his daughter across. Above the picnic-style table hung a hollow plastic piggy bank, spinning lazily, its tether winding and unwinding in the breeze of a ceiling fan.

Ethan took it upon himself to hail a waiter. He craned his neck, one languid hand extended like Adam’s on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Arthur, momentarily distracted by the enervated, fey quality of the gesture, observed his son and freestyle theorized that his mannerisms must be biologically linked in some grand unified way with those of other homosexuals around the world.

He set the theory aside.

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