Call Me Home Read Online Free PDF

nothing. His whole night was already mapped out – Randy’s aquatic basement, the empty pool, his father. He knew he would go and he went.
    His father’s car was gone when he made it to the house. The mobile home. There was a trash bag taped over the window his mother had sprawled through, a week ago now. A sickening, slow fall that he had watched from the hallway, his throat tight so that he almost couldn’t breathe. “Promise me you will never getinvolved,” his mother had told him. “It will make it worse.” She’d hung over the side of the frame, at the waist, where his father had thrown her, and then he came up behind her, kicked out the rest of the window, and watched her fall the four feet to the ground. Jackson had taken Lydia back to his room and held her there for the rest of the night. He’d gotten up once to throw up, hating everything, his father most of all.
    That was their last fight, the one that had landed him and his mother and Lydia in Everett, and it had started with him. It made him angry at himself, and at his father, and at his mother. He’d said something about moving to Seattle for school, Seattle Central Community College. His mother had smiled. “There’s queers up on Capitol Hill,” his father said. “It’s where the queers go.” He looked at Jackson, a half smile on his face.
    His mother put her hand on his father’s arm. “It’s a good school,” she said. “And it’s a little early to be talking about this, anyway.” It was too early, Jackson had thought, thinking about the weepy guidance counselor and the column of shitty grades on his transcript.
    â€œI’ll go where I want,” Jackson had said, and shrugged. And how had it gone from there? The loud confusion, his mother jumping to his defense. The window. Lydia in the back bedroom, chewing on her hands.
    His mother sat in a deadly calm for a few days. She listened over and over to a Bellamy Brothers record, which only made Jackson feel more certain that they were about to leave. Let your love flow. Each time before there had been an uncomfortable incongruous quality to the days – “Don’t forget your coat,” he remembered her telling Lydia once at noon on a ninety-degree day before they loaded up the car and took off for three weeks in Carnation.
    Jackson knew they were going to go, he could feel it, and so he went down to the pool one night and found Chris. “I might be gone for a while,” he said. Chris had barely acknowledged him. Jackson gave him a round wooden box he’d turned on a lathe in shop class. Inside he’d slipped – he couldn’t even believe thisnow – a lock of his hair. He hated to think about it. There was no way to make it not awful.
    He took a beer from the fridge – empty otherwise, except for mayonnaise, a carton of eggs, and an open bag of chips that his dad probably put there when he was drunk. He sat down and turned on the television, trying to pretend he was someone else – a guy at home. Watching a little TV. Drinking a beer. The news was less and less interesting. Someone’s tractor had slid into a ditch. There were too many animals for the local shelter. The key in the lock. “Hello?” His father.
    â€œJack,” his father said. Jackson could see he was drunk. His pants were unbuckled – it used to drive his mother crazy that his father would piss in the yard – and he looked at Jackson and smiled. “My boy.”
    â€œHi, Dad.”
    â€œWhere you been?”
    â€œAround. Came back to see you.”
    His father smiled. It was disarming, that smile. He had a shadowy face, eyes sunk deep under his brow, but then that hard, bright smile. One of his ears stuck out and when he smiled it made him seem goofy and disheveled. Jackson felt relieved. He wanted it to be normal, as though his mother and Lydia were just off somewhere