Call Me Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

shopping or at an appointment. No questions, just easy.
    His father took a beer from the fridge and brought another to Jackson. He sat down and put his legs up on the coffee table. He wasn’t a big man, but he was tall and strong. His arms were muscled and the table groaned under his heavy legs, his work boots. “Nothing on the news these days but shit,” he said.
    â€œSomebody put their tractor in a ditch,” Jackson said.
    His father laughed loudly. “This is good, Jack,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
    He smelled like sawdust and beer. “How’s your sister?”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œYour mother? How’s she?”
    â€œShe’s fine.”
    â€œSorry you had to see that quarrel.”
    Quarrel, Jackson thought, was not a word he’d ever heard his father use before. He shrugged again and drained his beer. He felt a terrible guilt for a moment, thinking of his mother. Her new blonde hair. She was probably lying on the motel bed right then. Trusting him. Rain spattered against the plastic that covered the window.
    â€œWhere you been staying?” his father asked. “Someplace safe, right?”
    â€œIt’s safe,” Jackson said. He looked down into his beer.
    â€œI hope your mother hurries up and heads home,” his father said darkly. “You better leave her number here. We should chat, Amy and me.”
    â€œNo, Dad.” He looked at a spot on the wall, where a picture had been. A hazy not-there mark. The news had gone off and there was some crime show playing.
    His father was quiet for a while, watching the fuzzy picture on the television. Jackson shook one of his father’s cigarettes from the pack on the coffee table and lit it. L&Ms. His father raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. The smoke curled up and then hung like a veil around the yellow lamp. The beer was making him sleepy, and he knew he shouldn’t be here, but at the same time it felt like the only place in the world he knew. There had been times when they’d been happy. He and his father and his mother. Less when Lydia was born, but that was only because things were harder. Money was tighter. Where had it gone? To shoes and food, according to his father. To Christmas presents.
    His father opened another beer and handed one to Jackson. There was something on the television – the crime show, the victim had been camping. “Do you remember when we went camping?” his father asked. “When we used to go?”
    Jackson remembered a river, wide and brown, moving slowly. It couldn’t have been Washington, or at least not the western half of the state. His father’s shorts rolled up around his thighs, the languid air, the water warm and torpid. All evening the moonhad wallowed in the oily water and his father had played the guitar while his mother sang, mournful, laughing. Jackson was small but still he was allowed to stand sunk to his neck in the river.
    They had slept there on the bank, on camp mats, the mud bank strewn with crockery and beer cans. All night long mosquitos whined in his ears and bats swung across the sky. They had lost a suitcase in the water and found it days later, shored up in ragweed and briar. And there had been a motorbike – before? after? – and then a summer rain, and his father had driven, and his mother sat on the back, and Jackson fit between them so he could see only narrow lines of sky and ground above and below his mother’s grasp. The water had come so quickly. He felt his mother’s hands pulling him closer, and his cheek was against the soaked cloth of his father’s shirt. He pulled his feet higher. He could see nothing, not the lights up ahead, not the trees washing free from their webbed roots, not the ground slipping away.
    Jackson burrowed into the sunken couch cushion. He felt a relief that he’d spend the night in his own room, his tiny bed. His father had