First You Try Everything by Jane Mccafferty Page A

He couldn’t drink his milk. “Go on and
play, then.”
    â€œYour grandpa was just trying to teach you a
lesson,” she’d said later that night, outside of the bedroom door where he lay
awake in the dark, her voice hoarse. “Maybe all that carrying on at the
breakfast table,” she half explained, leaving him to deduce that he shouldn’t
have told her riddles, shouldn’t have told the story about his friend at school
who went to SeaWorld, should have stayed quiet. She didn’t come into the room,
but he felt she’d wanted to, and hated her for those moments, feeling both her
desire to snatch him up and drive him to someplace far away, and her reverent
fear of the man that would allow for almost anything to happen in that
house.
    He’d never beaten Ben’s mother or her sister Grace.
He didn’t believe in beating the weaker sex. He’d beaten the shit out of his own
son, Jimmy, who’d moved to Nevada when he was seventeen years old, never to be
seen again, except for the one time Ben’s mother and Grace had taken Ben and the
twins and their cousins on a road trip when Ben was ten. Jimmy was a tall, thin
man with a head that seemed too heavy for his neck, a wide face, slicked-down
black hair, and large hands that held tightly to each other or pulled on the
opposite hand’s fingers. He managed a diner and took them there that first night
of the visit. It was late, they were road weary, the diner was decorated for
Christmas in July, but Ben was wide-eyed and fascinated by this uncle who barely
spoke, holding his body stiffly, laughing too loudly when one of the customers,
smoking in a booth, said, “About time you took a day off!” His outburst of
laughter was so awkward his mother and aunt exchanged a long, sad, meaningful
glance. Then they all sat down and ate rice pudding “on the house!,” Uncle Jimmy
boomed, though until then he’d been unusually soft-spoken. He sat up too
straight in the booth, not knowing how to ask the usual adult questions such as
“How’s school?” and “How old are you now?” but simply staring at all of them
with widely held hazel eyes, as if he’d never seen children before. Then said to
Ben, “Do you know what Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service man who fell on
Johnson when Kennedy was shot, said?”
    Ben shook his head.
    â€œRufus Youngblood said had it been Nixon, he
would’ve fallen the other way.”
    Ben’s mother and aunt Grace tried to help him. “So,
Jimmy, the kids love your state! Right, kids?” And June said, “Nevada’s cool,”
and Russell echoed her, but Ben nodded and sat there thinking about Rufus
Youngblood, whose name would resound in his head, repeating itself for days as
he thought of his uncle’s face and how it had looked in the diner.
    Before they left the next morning, after an awkward
good-bye that was strange for its brevity, given that his sisters hadn’t seen
him in all those years and would probably not see him again for a long, long
time, he ran out to their car—just as they were getting ready to get into it—and
bent down to sob in Ben’s arms. Everyone watched this. Why Ben? Why sob in the
arms of a ten-year-old boy? Ben was terrified. He stood there, paralyzed,
waiting for it to end, on the verge of sobbing himself.
    â€œJesus Christ! Leave the kid alone! You belong in
an institution, Jimmy!”
    â€œGrace! Stop it!” said Ben’s mother.
    â€œI think you’ve done us a favor by pretending we
don’t exist!” Grace persisted. Jimmy had let go of Ben, taken a step back, and
put his arm over his eyes. “I don’t understand myself anymore,” he said.
    â€œJimmy, don’t listen to Grace. She’s a wreck from
traveling,” said Ben’s mother, so different from both of her siblings, possessed
of kindness that seemed to him, in those years before the