Golden States Read Online Free PDF Page B

said, and immediately hung up.
    Mom was standing in the doorway. “You shouldn’t have said that.” She stood with her arms folded over her chest. He noticed her arms. Freckled on top, dead white on their undersides, the flesh so soft it favored whatever direction she leaned in. Her thin black watchband bit into the softness at her wrist-bone.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “My only wish in this whole world right now is for you to go back in there and eat your lamb. Would you do that for me?”
    “Okay,” he said. He went back into the dining room and said to Lizzie, “The answer is, a pig at least is worth some money.”
     
    _____
     
    After dinner, he went upstairs and walked softly into Mom’s room, avoiding the places in the hall where the floor creaked. Mom’s room was not expressly forbidden, but it opened off the dead end of the hall, and there was rarely any reason for going there. Even Mom stayed out of it, lingering downstairs over television until it was time to sleep. Any furnishing that wore out in another part of the house found its way to Mom’s room. She had the old watercolors of London hanging still in their chipped blond frames, and the lamps with the Mexican shades, and the chair covered in scratchy green material which, as far as David knew, had not been sat on since it left the living room back in kindergarten. He entered the room with a feeling of abashed humility, the way he would enter an abandoned, walled garden.
    The room was dark. David tiptoed to Mom’s dresser and pulled out the top drawer, careful not to let it squeak. A cloud of Mom’s smell rose like a ghost—her perfume and an underlayer of something sweet and old, like bread gone moldy. In this drawer were stacks of Mom’s white underwear, which gave off a hint of light. In the next drawer were sweaters, woolly and neutral-smelling, like a dream of sheep.
    The pistol was in the nightstand. The Starks had had it for years, since Dad first brought it home in first grade. It moved from one place to another around the house and finally came to rest here, in the nightstand, after Dad moved out. It had in a way ceased to exist, since no one had spoken about it in years. It simply edged itself into Mom’s room like other household objects. David wasn’t even sure whether he was supposed to know about it. He did know about it, and checked every so often to make certain it hadn’t moved. It lay on its side along with a bottle of aspirin, a yellow envelope full of negatives, a green, spiral-bound memo pad, a half dozen pens and pencils, and a deck of playing cards, held together with a dirty blue rubber band.
    The pistol was a dull licorice black, with a surprisinglyslender barrel and a short, nubbly handle. David knew its qualities only by sight. He had never touched it. It had too much slumbering life for that.
    He heard movement from downstairs. Lizzie’s voice, saying something sour and unintelligible, grew nearer. He hurriedly closed the drawer and crept back to his own room, where he dropped onto the bed and lay waiting for the sound of Janet coming back. He lay with his hands clasped behind his neck, a posture he had borrowed from Gonzo on “Trapper John” and was trying out for himself. On the ceiling hung a National Geographic map of the galaxy, saggy at the middle, edged with yellowed tape. A rectangle of starry night sky. Dad had put it up there for him, years ago.
    That was before Dad pushed him down the stairs. He knew because he remembered looking up at these same stars when they brought him home from the hospital with the stitches in his head. Dad and Mom had been fighting in their bedroom, and David had stood in the hall listening. He remembered something being said about Janet. Dad threw open the door yelling, “Stupid goddamn lies.” David screamed and then he was falling down the stairs. His forehead when it hit the banister made a sound like biting into an ice cube.
    That had been years ago. After school got