Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic. It hums in her head. But the room is still half full. The microphone is still on. There are three reporters from the student paper, and ten from national news outlets. There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.

Every year at the family reunion—before Cousin Monique comes to your rescue—the uncles sit back in their folding chairs and napkin-necks and ask about your father. They take you in with age-soggy eyes, as you stand before them in a floppy blouson and skirt. You look different now than you did in 1970 or 1981 or 1997—though you still have what lyrical Aunt Vitrine calls your swan quality. Cousin Monique had wanted to ditch the reunion for the shopping mall in Auntsville; she has always been your wings and, as such, was born to ignore the uncles: in 1970, she set fire to the truck belonging to one uncle and claimed it was lightning; in 1981, she put Ex-Lax in their pound cake frosting. Now she is nowhere to be seen. There’s no reason we can’t have fun at the reunion, you told her the night before, when she picked you up at Raleigh Airport. You’re right, Monique replied, grinning in the dark, the car pulling faster and faster along the blind curves of the road. Slave food and rockheads. I don’t see why that would in any way be an obstacle to fun, cousin.

Your blouson sticks to your skin. The uncles lean forward as if to smell you—girls here only wear that kind of top if they are in trouble—but gradually their eyes drift over the dirt hills across the street, behind the Baptist church. They don’t care if you’re like every other girl down here: fast Monique and her sisters Mae and Wanita and Tarnisha and Lynette. Her cousins Meggie and Mercy and Shawnelle and Winsome. Their kids LaDonna and Kelly and Juan and Quanasia and Cedric and Colin. Tons more. Monique’s mom had given her a fancy name in the hopes that she would be better than the rest. But look what happened, your father once remarked. 1981? 1982?

The uncles want news about him. Word on the road is that their nephew wants to return to his roots in North Carolina. The prodigal son returning—what a laugh, the uncles concur.

You stretch your eyes across the property, exasperating because it is huge and small at the same time and fills you with a familiar hopelessness. Monique and a friend were supposed to meet you at dawn. You all were supposed to slip out of your respective houses (you are staying with Aunt Nephronia, and Monique and Kate are, of course, staying with Monique’s mom, Vitrine, two houses down; as a child, this road of relatives fascinated you)—but you overslept, in part due to the brutally hot North Carolina night, in part due to your tears. Can a dead person ever change? Can time remove a tiger’s stripes? Those foolish questions made you weep in your sleep last night; in the days before your father died, you’d been too stingy to say goodbye.

The uncles look at you and say, Your daddy ain’t set foot here in near twenty years. But tell him we forgive him if he wants.

You need to tell them that he somehow finagled all the land from Great-Grandma Elldine and left it all to you in a will. Something about an unpaid loan, the land not being worth spit. The letter actually read, But why not enjoy it as your own, Sasha Jean. I utterly wish I could give you more.

The uncles are suddenly worked up in clammy anger.

How come he don’t answer when Vitrine call? That ain’t no way to be treating your one sister on this earth!

He always thought he was the best at checkers. Well, he got another thing coming.

If he thinking about parking that damn Cadillac in my yard again, he even crazier.

That sucker!

You’d had a dream, coming back to the folks in North Carolina: that you’d get a chance to talk smoothly after they all finished eating and were in good spirits; that you’d lay out everything Bobby Lee’s scribbled will said, though in reality it was vague, not more than four sentences. The sun wouldn’t be too hot and the children wouldn’t be too unruly. Dogs, as they happened to wander back and forth from each house, would not frighten you with their larva-laden ears. This was your dream. In reality, you can’t recall a single time that the uncles, in their walking days, didn’t eventually get smashed drunk and start fighting with the women. The pig, burnt to a crisp on the outside but pink as a newborn on the inside, would turn your stomach. The same gospel songs would be sung, the same protests as to who would hold the mic, who would gather the children from their hiding places and force them to sing. It’s not Sunday, one of them would say, relenting under a smack upside the head. How could your dream stand up to these details? Your dream was like a story that was told in the pages of some huge, incomprehensible book, spread out on a lemon-wax table in the only good part of someone’s house or trailer. Everyone sensed it was there but knew how to avoid it.

That and still: you want to find the right time to tell them—what better place for sad family news than at a reunion?—and you’re hoping that since it didn’t happen last night (your arrival at Nephronia’s, with glasses of Harveys Bristol Cream) or this morning (gluten-free breakfast crepes—à la the Food Network—with Vitrine), a suitable moment will come today.

Everyone is in the backyard of Grandma Elldine’s decrepit Victorian. Random picnic tables have been set out and on them, flies chill over Tupperwares of mac salad and wings. Curlyhead, feverfew, and false foxglove dot the perimeter but everyone treats them like weeds. Already at eleven in the morning, it is 90 degrees; the relatives fan themselves with their hands until someone drags out a standing General Electric and plugs it (via two extension cords) into an unseen outlet.

I hope my brother don’t think we still in the prehistoric days, Aunt Vitrine had said at the breakfast table, her gray wig toppling. I’m learning to eat healthy, Sasha Jean. Buttermilk, no heavy cream. You go back and tell my brother that for me. We all gone live forever, like it or not.

In reality, it should be easy to tell everyone that your father died (in his armchair, surrounded only by his home healthcare aide and General Hospital playing on the tablet in her hands). Perhaps they will expect you to cry, and then for you to expect them to cry back. Ancient Hattie Mabel carries a mic (via three extension cords) out to the middle of the yard, preparing to gospel. We can forgive, the uncles say. But hell if we can forget.

You are silent; handed a plate of beans and rice by a young boy; pushed into a chair next to the uncles, in direct sunlight. You mention that your daddy plans on coming down to the reunion next year. That he misses everyone and longs for the red earth of his childhood. The uncles raise their brows and laugh. They tell you, don’t lie. Ancient Hattie Mabel removes her hand from your shoulders and starts in with “The Old Rugged Cross.” You notice that she still has on her overnight curlers, that her eyes are closed as she sways from side to side, as if in a godly stew. The fragrance of the beans and rice is heavy for this time of day, but still you lift a fork. The uncles say they’ve never known you to be untrue.

They have heard rumors all these years. Your father, the big gambler, every weekend in Las Vegas, thousands lost. Your father, owner of not one but two homes in Los Angeles. Your father, the lady’s man. He never paid child support. He called himself a minister on his tax forms and got caught by the government people. He tried talking Grandma Elldine into selling him this property just before she went into Pine Haven Home but luckily she resisted his advances. He wanted to tear down the old Victorian the first chance he got.