Calling Home by Michael Cadnum Page A

has.”
    â€œHas what?”
    â€œHad a cheapening effect on you. You talk about your mother’s love life like it was some trash in some soap opera you were talking about, not your own mother.”
    â€œYou should hear how she talks to me.”
    â€œThat’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I mean. I don’t want you living in that snake pit of worry and frustration—”
    â€œAnd blacks and queers and—”
    â€œAll right, you little twerp. Sure. Say it all. I’m afraid you aren’t working out at all well. I’m afraid you’re hanging out with sluts and teenage alcoholics and God knows what.”
    I tried to be offended, but my father wasn’t like my mother. He was obnoxious, but he was being frank; he wasn’t trying to irritate me into a fit of fury so that he could prove to me how immature I was, like my mother. He was goading me, but it was to make another kind of point. He wanted to give to me.
    â€œI’m all right. I really am. I’m a perfectly normal person.”
    â€œI know you are. I know. I can tell by looking at you. You’ve got a little of your mother’s coloring, but you’re a good, solid, healthy-looking young man.” He said “young man” like he was going to say “kid,” and his care in choosing his words offended me.
    â€œI am perfectly normal,” I said, like someone in a trance. “In every way.”
    â€œMaybe your mother has exaggerated. She talks about your friends like they were something that crawled out of Slime Mountain.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œI don’t know. She says you spend time with one or two very creepy characters.”
    â€œShe doesn’t have any right to have opinions like that. My friends are good people. She’s telling lies.” I thought of Mead, and I found myself wanting to cry.
    He examined a cookie for a moment. He glanced at me, then said, like he was addressing the cookie, “I think that your mother is worked up over a lot of things. I think you frighten her.”
    â€œFor no reason!” I began.
    My father smiled, and for the first time, maybe in my life, I liked him. I saw how a man his age looked at a person like me, and how the way I argued with him made me, in his eyes, a callow, foolish, but lovable animal.
    â€œFor no reason,” I repeated dully.
    â€œThere’s another reason I wanted you to come down here,” he said after wrapping the cookies in the slit cellophane. He did not continue at once, and seemed for the first time that evening to want to go slowly and take his time with language, instead of steering along like words had to be used fast or they might stall on you.
    â€œWhat reason is that?” I asked, but an insane flame flickered inside me, and I thought that he must know everything, that this entire conversation had been a sneaky game, and that the police would step out of the darkness of the living room like a troupe of trained bears and handcuff me to the refrigerator.
    â€œIt’s something terribly important.” He nestled the package of cookies into a corner next to the toaster.
    I was queasy, and the tang of cookies in my mouth was sour and almost toxic as I understood how quickly my life had changed from a normal life, filled with simple fears, to a blasted waste. “What?” I croaked.
    â€œI’m getting married.”

17
    I stumbled on a train track in the dark, and scratched my hand on a tumbleweed that grew out of the sand like a huge, shaggy head. Sand filled my shoes, so I sat on a short wall and took them off. I took off my socks, too, and carried them in my hand toward the surf.
    The spray glowed in the dark as the waves crashed and grumbled at each other, and flattened quietly. I sat in the sand where it was only a little damp from the spray and eased the bottle out of my jacket pocket. It was a full liter, and carrying it down the sidewalks lined with porch