Plus they were smart. He, Trenton, slouchy and barely hanging on to his grades, had nothing to offer them.
Integrity. Integrity was showing up with your hair fuzzy, in a fleece. Integrity was doing your best in school because you liked it, even if people called you a fag and elbowed you into the walls, when they weren’t busy pretending you didn’t exist.
Everyone in his family lacked integrity. They were corrupt (antonym). His mom, Caroline, was the worst. She had lied to everyone for so long, Trenton wasn’t even sure she knew the difference anymore. He thought probably she’d always been fake, and he had only noticed recently. Now he knew he couldn’t trust anything she said, especially things about his father. “He loved you, Trenton, very much . . .”
Bullshit.
He had believed for a long time that Minna had integrity, but he’d been wrong. He could hardly look at her, ever, without noticing her additions, which seemed to point at the world like an accusation. And he knew, from his mom, there had been other stuff: tugs and pulls, needles and pills, all things she didn’t need. He might have been prepared to forgive her if it hadn’t been for what had happened during Family Weekend in the spring.
And Minna hadn’t even apologized. She avoided the subject neatly, the way she avoided everything, because she lacked integrity, because she was corrupt, because she was full of shit.
Amy was all right. But Amy didn’t count because she was six and didn’t know better. She would probably grow up to be as full of shit as the rest of them.
He’d hardly seen his dad since his parents divorced, and Trenton had never been back to Coral River. Instead, Richard came to New York. He took Trenton to shows he didn’t care about seeing and dragged him to restaurants where everything on the menu had some disgusting ingredient, when Trenton would have preferred to get a burger. But in a weird way, Trenton had been closest to his father. Trenton knew his dad was impossible—particular, obsessive, pompous (another word from Ms. Patterson), a complete egomaniac and kind of a dick.
But he’d also been honest. Brutally, totally honest. Trenton still remembered the time they’d been at Boulud, and Trenton had been trying to conceal the fact that he had a hard-on (why the f**k did he have a hard-on? The waitress, who wasn’t even that hot, touched his shoulder with her br**sts for one second, as she leaned down to take away his wineglass), and his dad had suddenly said to him: “Look, you’ll hear a lot of bullshit from your mother. And I was a shit husband. I was. But the woman is batshit crazy and I did my best. Remember that, Trenton. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And later, after half a glass of wine, Trenton had found himself in the back of a taxi, blinking away tears and feeling grateful.
“Dinner, Trenton!” His sister’s voice came through the floorboards, and he thought he heard a slight sigh.
Integrity. That word was still there, like a small staircase in his mind, leading up to the inevitable.
Trenton wanted to die with integrity. There was one reason—and one reason only—that he had agreed to come back to this place that was no longer a home: to die.
As he passed into the dark hallway, and felt his way to the stairs and the light down below, he turned that idea over inside of him, and it brought him comfort.
And he ignored the wisp of a whisper that seemed to say, from very far away, “I wish they’d let the whole place burn.”
ALICE
Dinner is delivery from Mick’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant. I recognize the name from the dinners the night nurse would pick up for Richard, when he was still eating solid foods. Macaroni salad and roast beef sandwiches were his favorite.
I’ve never been to Mick’s. In my day, Coral River had only a general store, a Woolworths, a post office, a bar, and a movie theater that showed one film a month. Sandra informs me that when she was alive, Coral River added an Italian restaurant and a McDonald’s, a new bar, two more gas stations, a hardware store, a bookstore, and a clothing boutique called Corduroy. The town can only have grown since then.
Minna, Caroline, Amy, and Trenton eat their dinners straight from the deli containers, not even bothering to throw out the plastic bag, which they leave balled on the center of the table. Trenton eats a cheese sandwich, plain, on white bread. He chews moodily, noisily, occasionally letting a bit of cheese drop onto the wax paper the sandwich came in, now unfurled on the table like a stiff white flower.
Caroline eats cold macaroni salad—an unconscious echo of her ex-husband’s preferences—and hot chicken soup, and becomes increasingly withdrawn as the vodka in her water glass takes effect. Minna picks at a chef’s salad and complains that the produce is disgusting. Amy eats a tray of baked ziti and winds up covered with tomato sauce, a ring of red around her lips like a second mouth.
Sandra misses drinking. I miss food. It’s funny—I never had much of an appetite when I was alive. Even when I was pregnant with Maggie, I was hardly ever hungry, and what little I did eat came up just as quickly. My doctor said I was the skinniest pregnant woman he’d ever seen. I made it through all nine months on tinned green beans, tuna fish, and a little bit of beer. That was all I could keep down, and of course we weren’t so concerned in those days about drinking when we were carrying a baby.
Now food is practically all I can think about: pork roast and gravy; buttered potatoes and my mother’s spiced Christmas loaf; fried eggs, yolks high and proud and orange as a setting sun; toast dipped in bacon fat and the first summer peach; pools of cream; and fluffy biscuits.
I remember the first time Ed and I ate a TV dinner in front of our twelve-inch black-and-white, how happy we were balancing the small plastic tray on our knees and eating the mass of mushed peas, the disintegrating roast. And I remember the first time I took an airplane to visit Maggie, when I was already in my fifties: the shiny look of the pleather seats, and the way the stewardesses smiled; compartmentalized mashed potatoes, a flat gray disk of turkey, and Jell-O, each thing separated by small plastic dividers. That’s modernity, if you ask me: endless division.
Yogurt and blueberries; margarine and brussels sprouts.
I remember:
A copper pot: a wedding gift from my mother, presented to me covertly, so my father wouldn’t see. (“God help you,” she said, her last words to me.)
A large saucepan, of blackened cast iron: a welt swelling on my thumb, shiny red and taut, like the head of a newborn.
The window: open above the stove; the smell of chicken fat and oil. Blue columbine clung to the windowsill; the shadows outside were long and lavender.