Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

A week after my birthday, my father woke me up, quieter than usual. He seemed solemn. I still had my graduation cap tacked up on the wall, its yellow tassel hanging jauntily. My mother had taken the dress I’d worn that day to the dry cleaner, and it still lay pooled on the floor in its plastic.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked.

“Where are you taking me?” I wanted to know.

“To the train station,” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”

My father had always liked the idea of traveling. Even just walking through an airport gave him a thrill—it made him buoyant, seeing all those people hurrying through the world on their way to somewhere else. He had a deep interest in history, and the architecture of places he’d never seen in person. It was the great tragedy of his life that he became a real estate agent. As for my mother, it was the great tragedy of her life that her husband was unhappy and didn’t take any pains to hide it. I can see that now, even if I didn’t see it then.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked. “And where’s James?”

“The grocery store,” my father said. James loved the grocery store—the order of things, all neat in their rows. “Don’t cry,” Dad said then, smoothing my pillowcase, still warm with sleep. He had a pained look on his face. “Don’t cry,” he said again. I hadn’t noticed it had started. My whole body felt emotional in those days, like I was an egg balanced on a spoon.

“You’ll be good,” he said. “You’ll do good.”

“But what about junior college?” I asked. “What about plans?” I’d already received a stack of glossy school pamphlets in the mail. True, I didn’t know what to do with them yet, but I had them just the same.

“No time,” my father said, and the urgency in his voice made me hurry.

We stood on the platform at the train station—just as I’d pictured at fifteen, like I were a character in a history book, Manifesting My Own Destiny! He held my face in both palms and squeezed, a gentle vise. The sky was bright blue and wide open, as though it had been shelled from a duller sky.

“You’ll miss me,” I said. I said it like a question.

“Of course,” he said.

“Will I do OK?”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course, of course, of course.” The series of “of courses” worried me, as though he were trying to convince us both of something.

“Doth protest too much,” I said.

“Ha!” My father pointed at a pigeon pecking its head in an odd little dance.

We hugged for a long time. My dad was tall, and he rested his chin against the top of my head. “Don’t forget to shake my hand,” he whispered into my hair. “We have an agreement, after all.” He made a choking noise—a sob?—and ruffled my too-long bangs. He stuffed a sweaty wad of money into my palm. I put it in my purse. He handed me another.

“That’s it,” he said. “I wish I had more.”

“Where will I go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Wherever you want, I guess! You can buy a ticket when you get on the train. You used to talk about New York all the time.” That’s true, I did—but in an abstract, watercolor way. I knew nothing about living on my own, especially in a city that “stayed up all night.” I was usually in bed by eleven, quick to fall asleep, books always splitting open onto my chest after I’d only read a few paragraphs. In fact, I’d only just started doing my own laundry last week, and I had to keep calling upstairs to my mother, about the separation of darks and lights, and when to put in the detergent. When?!

I could hardly manage to think about my mother, who was very pretty, I realized all of the sudden, and maybe always had been. (My mother had red hair, and I once heard a man at the post office tell her that from far away she looked like she was on fire. He had an odd look on his face, a half smile, as if he’d won something.)

“Shouldn’t I wait to say bye?” I asked. “Won’t Mom be mad?”

“It’s for the best,” my father said. “She’ll only try to convince you to stay.”

“But what about my friends,” I said. “I haven’t said bye to anyone!” I started thinking of odd people—our neighbor Carl and his miniature pinscher, my debate coach Mrs. Swanson who told me I touched my face too much when I talked, the boy with the unusually deep voice who worked the counter at CVS. “And James?”

“You’ll see them again,” he said.

“OK,” I said, turning away from him. I hoped my back looked brave. From the train, I watched him through the window until I couldn’t see him anymore, and the hand he’d been waving became like the minute hand of a clock—tiny—and then nothing at all.

After all that, I only went to LA. I didn’t have enough money to get to New York, and anyway, that would have taken a long time on the train. On the ride, I met my first adult friend. He was sloshing down the aisles like he was drunk. He wasn’t drunk though, just prone to motion sickness. His name was Charlie.

Charlie came with questions, I could tell. They animated his face before he spoke. He had just graduated from college, he told me. He had had three beers in the dining car, he volunteered, but was not drunk, just prone to motion sickness.

“Are you on your way back to school?” was his first question.

“No,” I said, “I’m just leaving home. I might not even go to college.”

He leaned forward. I wasn’t scared, just curious. He had a harmless face—too round for murder. My mom was a big believer in physiognomy, and it had stuck with me. Your long limbs, she would say, means you’ll always be efficient. I’ll always be awkward, I’d say, but she assured me I was misreading my own body.

“Are you a runaway?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “not exactly.” I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about my family, that it was bad somehow, damaged. But then I wondered what sort of value that might have, the wrong idea about me—that I’d withstood something traumatic, that I was wise or strong. I decided the fewer words I said, the better. I’d be a person who spoke very little, but when I spoke, it would be especially important.

“I just left,” I said, “I got up one day and left. Didn’t even say bye to my mom.”

“That’s terrible,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

A silence fell over the two of us, one that made my pulse bang in all the wrong places—my wrist, my throat—and I asked him to tell me more about college. He’d studied political science, he said, “a stupid major, because it only made me cynical.” That’s what I wanted to be, too, I decided right then: cynical. It seemed fitting for the new personality I was cultivating.

“So,” he said, leaning closer. “What were your parents like ?”

I understood where this question was leading. “Terrible,” I said. I felt the pinprick of tears somewhere behind my eyes. “Scary-awful.”

Just then the slot of air between us lessened. He was leaning even closer. He had very nice teeth, prep-school teeth. I, too, leaned closer. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I’m on my own now.”

“Geez, I should never complain about my parents,” he said. “They really are nice to me. I mean my dad asks stupid questions all the time, and never listens to what I tell him, but geez, nothing like you went through.”

I nodded. Maybe I would be an actress. Why not?

Charlie said I could stay at his place until I found something more permanent. He lived off of Pico in a brown stucco apartment with palm trees cemented in the sidewalk. Someone had scrawled the words Here fur good on one of the garage doors. Charlie had two roommates who were rarely there, and when they were there, they were always on their way out. I only ever saw them in motion—dashes of solid-colored T-shirts, streaks of floppy, surfer-boy hair. They seemed used to having a visitor.