The Rules of Inheritance Read Online Free PDF

her.
    Â 
    Months later, years later, when I think back on this moment, I’ll wish for so much more from it. In my head I’ll scoop her up from the car seat like an infant. I’ll hold her against me, burying my head into her. Mom, Mom, Mom. Years later I’ll cry hard and loud, wishing I had done exactly this.
    Â 
    But instead I just give her that awkward hug and then I climb into my car. I let out a breath, light a cigarette, and put both hands on the wheel. I had insisted on leaving, on returning to school, but now that I’m actually doing it I feel uneasy.
    Â 
    It’s a seven-hour drive back to Marlboro and already late afternoon when I leave. As I drive the last hundred miles through Massachusetts and into Vermont, a snowstorm sets in. I can hardly see the road, the world outside a blurry white eclipse. I drive thirty miles an hour, smoke cigarette after cigarette. I listen to the same songs on repeat.
    Â 
    I am frightened as I drive through the storm. It’s not the snow or the road that I’m afraid of but the fact that I’m doing this alone. Just four months ago my parents were driving me to college, our cars laden down with flannel sheets and lamps that would clip to the headboard of my bunk bed.
    Â 
    On that three-day drive from Atlanta to Vermont my mother rode in my car with me, my father alone in the Acura, leading the way along the highway. On the last night of the trip I broke down crying at a restaurant in Massachusetts. My mother sat outside on the steps with me, rubbing my back.
    Â 
    Why did I pick a school so far away? I mumble through my sobs.
    Â 
    My mother smiles, leans into me. She wasn’t sick again yet.
    Â 
    Because you’re brave, she says. And ambitious and hungry for the world.
    Â 
    Tears ran down my cheeks, and I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to Atlanta and to my bedroom in the basement. Back to curfews and dinner times, back to being a kid.
    Â 
    My mother rubbed my back, and we sat there until I stopped crying.
    Â 
    I think about this now as I drive through the snow, through Massachusetts in the middle of the night, my mother asleep in her hospital bed in DC.
    Â 
    As I finally make my way to campus it is a dark, dead place, and I instantly want to take everything back. I want to go home. I want my mother.

    TWO WEEKS GO BY. I trudge back and forth to my classes. Christine is gone all the time, busy with a new playwright boyfriend. Christopher is in New Jersey. Michel is nowhere to be seen, having holed up after his brief relationship with Kate fizzled out.
    Â 
    One afternoon toward the end of January, my father calls. I am sick of these calls. I hate the student who finds me, holding out a little Post-it note: Your dad called. I hate the little phone booth under the stairs in Howland where I go to return his calls.
    Â 
    Your mother is unconscious, he says.
    Â 
    I pick at the flyer on the wall. Rip another corner off and turn the bit of paper over in my fingers.
    Â 
    The doctors say she won’t last more than a few more days.
    Â 
    I open my fingers, watch the piece of paper drift to the floor.
    Â 
    We talked about it, your mother and me. We decided that you should stay at school.
    Â 
    He takes a breath. He is waiting for me to say something.
    Â 
    I can’t think of anything to say.
    Â 
    But look, kiddo, you’re an adult now. You’re eighteen. It’s up to you.
    Â 
    I breathe through my mouth.
    Â 
    I’m coming, I say, and I hang up the phone.
    Â 
    It’s already afternoon, but I figure I can be in DC by midnight. In my room I throw a few things in a bag: a book I’m reading, a pack of cigarettes, the shirt my mother bought me during parents’ weekend. I leave a note for Christine.
    Â 
    It’s one of those cold, overcast days where everything looks silvery and bright, just before it snows. I take my foot off the accelerator and let the car gather momentum as I wind down