The Best American Short Stories 2013 Read Online Free PDF

work held an inherent dignity. This was what he’d always repeated, but of course no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father’s ambitions.
    “When I was a boy,” my old man said, “this town was the middle of nowhere. It still is, I know. But imagine it before they re-routed the highway. We knew there was something else out there—another country to the south, the capital to the north—but it felt very far away.”
    “It was.”
    “You’re right. It was. We were hours from civilization. Six or seven to the border, if not more. But the roads were awful. And
spiritually
—it was even farther. It required a certain kind of imagination to see it.”
    I smiled. I thought I was making him laugh, but really, I was just trying to close off the conversation, shut it down before it headed somewhere I didn’t want it to go. “I’ve always been very imaginative,” I said.
    My old man knew what I was doing, even if I didn’t.
    “Yes, son. You have. Maybe not imaginative enough, though.”
    I didn’t want to ask him what he meant, so I sat, letting the silence linger until it forced him to answer my unspoken question.
    “I’m sorry,” my old man said. “I wonder if you’ve thought much about your future, that’s all.”
    “Sure I have. All the time.”
    “To the exclusion of thinking about your present?”
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    “What would you say?”
    I paused, attempting to strip my voice of any anger before I spoke. “I’ve thought a great deal about my future, so that my present could seem more livable.”
    He nodded slowly. We sipped carefully from our steaming cups. For once, I was grateful for my old man’s obsession with tea—it allowed us to pause, gather our thoughts. It excused us from having to talk, and the danger of saying things we might not mean.
    “You and Rocío seem well.”
    I never spoke about my relationships with my parents.
    “Sure. We’re doing fine.”
    There was something else he wanted to ask me, I could tell, but he didn’t. He narrowed his eyes, thinking, and then something changed in his face—a slackness emerged, the edges of his mouth dropped. He’d given up.
    “I always hated this house,” my old man said after a few minutes. “I can’t imagine that anyone would want it. We should bulldoze the thing and be done with it.”
    It was all the same to me, and I told him so. We could set it on fire, or shatter every last brick with a sledgehammer. I had no attachments to this place, to this town. My father did, but he preferred not to think about them. It was a place to visit with a heavy heart, when an old relative died. Or with your family on holiday, if such a luxury could be afforded. Francisco, it occurred to me, might feel the same way toward the city where we’d been raised.
    “I’ve let you down,” my old man said. His voice was timid, hushed, as if he hadn’t wanted me to hear.
    “Don’t say that.”
    “We should have pushed you harder, sent you away sooner. Now . . .” He didn’t finish, but I understood that
now
, in his estimation, was far too late.
    “It’s fine.”
    “I know it is. Everyone’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, your mother’s fine too. Even Francisco is fine, or so the rumor goes, God bless the U.S.A. Everything is fine. Just ask the mummies sitting on the benches out there. They spend every evening telling the same five stories again and again, but if you ask them, they’ll respond with a single voice that everything is
just fine
. What do we have to complain about?”
    “I’m not complaining,” I said.
    “I know you aren’t. That’s precisely what concerns me.”
    I slumped, feeling deflated. “I’ll leave when the visa comes. I can’t leave before that. I can’t do anything before that.”
    My father winced. “But it isn’t entirely accurate to say you can’t do
anything
, is it?”
    “I suppose not.”
    “Consider this: what if it doesn’t come? Or what if it comes