Florida Read Online Free PDF Page B

hands.
    Try again, she said.
    His daughter grew, sturdy and blonde like his wife, with no ash of Jude’s genius for numbers. They were as dry as biscuits in her mouth; she preferred music and English. For this, he was glad. She would love more moderately, more externally. If he didn’t cuddle with her theway her mother did, he still thought he was a good father: he never hit her, he never left her alone in the house, he told her how much he loved her by providing her with everything he could imagine she’d like. He was a quiet parent, but he was sure she knew the scope of his heart.
    And yet his daughter never grew out of wearing a singularly irritating expression, one taut with competition, which she first wore when she was a very little girl at an Easter egg hunt. She could barely walk in her grass-stained bloomers, but even when the other children rested out of the Florida sunshine in the shade, eating their booty of chocolate, Jude’s little girl kept returning with eggs too cunningly hidden in the sago palms to have been found in the first frenzy. She heaped them on his lap until they overflowed, and she shrieked when he told her firmly that enough was enough.
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    His fat old uncle came over for dinner once, then once a week, then became a friend. When the uncle died of an aneurysm while feeding his canary, he left Jude his estate of moth-eaten smoking jackets and family photos in ornate frames.
    The university grew around Jude’s last ten-acre parcel, a protective cushion between the old house and the rest of the world. The more construction around their plot of land, the fewer snakes Jude saw, until he felt no qualms about walking barefoot in the St. Augustine grassto take the garbage to the edge of the drive. He built a fence around his land and laughed at the university’s offers, sensing desperation in their inflating numbers. He thought of himself as the virus in the busy cell, latent, patient. The swamp’s streams were blocked by the university’s construction, and it became a small lake, in which he installed some bubblers to keep the mosquitoes away. There were alligators, sometimes large ones, but he put in an invisible fence, and it kept his family’s dogs from coming too close to the water’s edge and being gobbled up. The gators only eyed them from the banks.
    And then, one day, Jude woke with the feeling that a bell jar had descended over him. He showered with a sense of unease, sat at the edge of the bed for a while. When his wife came in to tell him something, he watched in confusion at the way her mouth opened and closed fishily, without sound.
    I think I’ve gone deaf, he said, and he didn’t so much hear his words as feel them vibrating in the bones of his skull.
    At the doctor’s, he submitted to test after test, but nobody understood what had gone wrong in his brain or in his ears. They gave him a hearing aid that turned conversation into an underwater burble. Mostly, he kept it off.
    At night, he’d come out into the dark kitchen, longing for curried chicken, raw onion, preserved peaches, tastes sharp and simple to remind himself that he was still there. He’d find his daughter at the kitchen island, herlovely mean face lit up by her screen. She’d frown at him and turn the screen to show him what she’d discovered: cochlear implants, audiologic rehabilitation, miracles.
    But there was nothing for him. He was condemned. He ate Thanksgiving dinner wanting to weep into his sweet potatoes. His family was gathered around him, his wife and daughter and their closest friends and their children, and he could see them laughing, but he couldn’t hear the jokes. He longed for someone to look up, to see him at the end of the table, to reach out a hand and pat his. But they were too happy. They slotted full forks into their mouths and brought the tines out clean. They picked the flesh off the turkey, they scooped the pecans out of