Free Canada by Richard Ford

found out about herself—she wrote—was that while all the ways she knew herself to be (when she looked in the mirror and saw the unusual person she was) were accurate and true, she was also weak. Which she’d never thought before, but was the reason, she believed, she’d married smiling, good-looking, romantic Bev Parsons. (She was pregnant, but she could’ve taken care of that, something even college girls in the ’40s knew how to do.) Being weak was why she hadn’t long ago left Bev and taken us away. These facts now confirmed to her that she was just like anybody else, which led her inexorably (by her demented logic) to robbing a bank. Not that she believed she was a criminal. She never thought that. Her parents hadn’t raised her to be capable of believing such a thing (which may have had to do with being Jewish where there were no Jews, and with preserving a feeling of specialness that didn’t allow adopting other people’s views and cautions, as reasonable as they might’ve been).
    But what I thought—and I thought it when Berner and I were inside our house alone and our parents were in their cells in the Cascade County jail—was how young our parents were then. Only thirty-seven and thirty-four. And that they were not the people to rob a bank. Yet because very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me.
    Though it’s an odd thing to believe about your parents—that all along they’ve been the kind of people criminals come from. It’s like a miracle in reverse. I’m sure it’s what my mother meant when she said she was “weak.” To her, the two words— criminal and weak —may have meant the same thing.

Chapter 9
    B Y MONDAY MORNING SOMETHING HAD CHANGED in the house. Large occurrences were going on—larger than my father beginning a new job, or leaving the Air Force, or packing up and moving to a new town. Our parents had stayed in their room with the door closed until late the night before, and I knew they’d argued. I made out he was determined to do something she disagreed with. I heard their closet door slam a few times, and my mother say, “This is the last time . . .” and, “You will not get him . . .” and, “This is the craziest. . . .” Each time her voice started loud and quickly fell away so I couldn’t hear the last. Three different times my father walked out of their bedroom and went out onto the front porch. (I heard his boots on the boards.) He came back inside each time and their door closed, and they began talking again. “So what choice do you see?” he said. And “You’re always timid in these things.” And “That’s not how you get caught, anyway.” After a while they said only a few words to each other. Then that tapered off. I left my room and went to the kitchen, where the light was on, and drank a glass of water. A bead of orange light shone under their door. When I climbed back in bed, Berner was there. She didn’t say anything. She just lay breathing and chilled, her face to the wall that had my college pennants on it. This was not something we’d done since we lived in Great Falls—though we’d slept together in smaller houses when we were children. I wasn’t comfortable with her in bed. But I knew she wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been important, and that she’d been listening the way I had. She smelled of cigarettes and hard candy, and all her clothes were on. We went to sleep after our parents stopped talking. Though in the morning when I woke up, both my fists were clenched and ached, and Berner was gone, and we didn’t talk about it when I saw her again. It was as if it hadn’t happened.
    MY FATHER was generally in a good humor in the mornings. But that Monday morning he acted grave about something.