A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver

Truman charged loudly enough for the waitress to hear, 'were you not born in Raleigh, North Carolina?'
      I hunched over my pastry and muttered, 'From. I came from London, I didn't say I was born there. Now eat your doughnut.'
      He wouldn't. He arched back from it stolidly, as I had from cold potroast on Sunday afternoons.
      My own snack was unexpectedly melancholic. Sure, it was shite—the custard filling hadn't been within miles of an egg, all corn-starch and yellow colouring, but the dough itself was motherly, and the chocolate icing formed a nice crinkly skin over the top. I made a right mess of it, and was enjoying myself until I looked at Truman, arms folded in disgust, doughnut untouched.
      'Something wrong with this here creme-fill?'
      'Aside from having about six hundred empty calories—'
      'There is only something wrong,' I interrupted, 'with my kill-joy brother. Can we have that take-away, please?
      'You needn't have been rude,' I whispered out the door.
      'And you needn't have lied,' said Truman. 'If you've really come back to Raleigh for good, you're going to have to can that Cheerio! la-di-da.'
      'Just cause Ah come home don't mean Ah have to sayound lahk a moh-ron.'
      'Keep practising,' he said as we loped down Bloodworth. He grabbed my waxed paper bag and dropped the bavarian creme summarily in a passing bin. My brother was getting uppity.
      'So have you?' asked Truman. 'Come back for good?'
      'For a while, I guess. For years I was driven to get away—from this town, from our family. Why do you think I wanted to hit Krispey Kreme? At least it hasn't changed. Because lately, the past is getting away from me.'
      I had long regarded my history as a ball and chain, so had spent every spare minute trying to file it off. Raleigh itself had seemed a purgatory of the obscure whose most malevolent power was to suck me back. In two short years I realized that the past was instead terrifyingly evanescent. Increasingly, the town where I grew up did not exist.
      'I mean, now Mordecai's going to force our house on the market,' I went on. 'Maybe that's the limit. No house, no parents—I'm not sure I want to be that free.'
      We were on the outer edges of Oakwood, where the Colonial Revivals were smaller and closer together, painted in original Reconstruction colours that approached garish—magentas, lavenders, and corals glared on window sashes, which must have suited the onslaught of posh homosexuals that had recently moved in en masse. We turned on Polk Street to enter Oakwood Cemetery, where the setting sun lemoned gravestones on hillocks.
      We hiked up to the Confederate burial ground, a grid of modest identical slabs a foot high, engraved with nameless dates. After the Civil War, Union troops still occupied Raleigh. They refused to allow Confederate dead to remain in the federal cemetery on Tarboro Road, insisting that the corpses—grey in every sense now—be exhumed to make room for Union graves: one more Southern grudge to bear, and this town thrived on them. In 1867 the Wake County Memorial Association dug up some five
    hundred bodies and lugged them over here. Later, the same association hauled corpses down from the heathen North, and now there were 3000 Confederate graves on this hill. We used to play here as children, upsetting the caretakers with our shrill irreverence, and swiping plastic stars and bars from headstones to bring home and deliberately appal my father.
      The official halfway point in Truman's walk was a small memorial house erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with cold cement benches and flagstone floor. The damp, still air was sweet with unraked leaves. From one of many bronze plaques to fallen rebels inset in granite, Truman read out:

    Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
    Treat it gently it is holy—
    For it droops above the dead.
    Touch it not—unfold it never,
    Let it droop there, furled forever,
    For its people's hopes are