The Affinities Read Online Free PDF

Mama Laura spoke up once, to ask me if I wanted more mashed potatoes. I thanked her, but no.
    â€œHow are your courses coming?” she asked during a lull.
    â€œNot bad.”
    â€œI can’t imagine how that works. I mean graphic design school. Do you draw a lot of pictures?”
    â€œThere’s a little more to it than that.”
    â€œI’m sure there must be.”
    Aaron and my father exchanged impatient glances and went back to the subject of the Middle East, the skyrocketing price of oil. I looked at Geddy, who was sitting across from me, but Geddy’s attention was entirely focused on his plate, where he was rearranging his food without eating much of it. He looked tired. His face was bloated. He was easily frightened, and his best defense, now as ever, was to retreat into himself. Grammy Fisk had always been kind to Geddy, as she had always been kind to me—what would Geddy do without her? His mother would look after him, but who would understand him?
    We all turned in after the living room clock chimed eleven. I slept in the room that had been mine for years. I raised the sash of the window an inch or so. The rain had come through Onenia County with a cold front on its heels, and the breeze that lifted the hem of the curtain was fresh and moist. Every sound was familiar: the front-yard willow tossing in the wind, rainwater gushing from the downspouts, the four-cornered echo of a known space. It was the rest of the house that felt hollowed-out, heartless.
    In the morning we went to visit Grammy Fisk.
    *   *   *
    We camped out in the visitor’s lounge and took turns spending time with her. I went into the room after my father and Aaron left it.
    Grammy Fisk was unresponsive, and a doctor had told us as diplomatically as possible that there was very little higher brain function going on, but it was still possible—or so we told ourselves and pretended to believe—that she might be aware of our presence. I doubted it as soon as I saw her. Grammy Fisk wasn’t in that room. It was her body on the bed all right, intubated and monitored, her cheeks sunken where her dentures had been removed (an indignity she would never have tolerated), but she was gone. Just plain gone. When I took her hand it felt inert, like something made out of pipe cleaners and papier-m â ch é .
    Still, I thanked her for everything she had given me. Which was much. Not least, the idea that I might not be entirely alone in the world.
    *   *   *
    Jenny Symanski arrived at the hospital late in the afternoon. We hugged, but there was time for only a few words before Jenny spent a few minutes of her own with Grammy Fisk. While we waited, Mama Laura hinted that it would be all right if I took Jenny out to dinner. The rest of the family would make shift with the hospital commissary, but she thought Jenny deserved something a little classier now that I was back in town. And I agreed.
    We took my car. I drove Jenny away from the hospital, past the outlet malls and down the old main street of Schuyler, to what had been our hangout for years, a Chinese restaurant called Smiling Dragon. Green linoleum floors, a desperately unhealthy ficus in the window, no pretensions.
    Jenny’s dad had been my father’s friend and drinking partner for more than thirty years. Both had started out with a modest family grubstake, and both had achieved modest fortunes by Onenia County standards. Jenny’s dad owned a vast acreage of hardscrabble farmland north of town, which he had developed into housing tracts and strip malls during Schuyler’s better days; my father had turned the hardware store he inherited into a statewide chain of Fisk’s Farm Supply outlets. The families had grown up together. I had spent a lot of time at Jenny’s place when we were younger, until her mother’s alcoholism made my presence there uncomfortable; after that, Jenny had become an honorary