Free A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver Page A

scraping his wife’s spaghetti into the rubbish. ‘Besides, if she didn’t have anyone else to live for, whose fault was that?’
‘Hers,’ insisted Mordecai. They lived in a smug self-congratulatory unit of two. Don’t kid yourself that we ever meant much to them—or that we could have made the slightest difference when Father was gone.’
Truman ran water in the sink, and kept his back to his brother. ‘You didn’t make much difference, that’s for sure.’
‘Didn’t you ever imagine what it might be like if she lived to a hundred? Getting heavier and weak in the head, talking about Father all the time? Wetting her bed, no longer able to drive? Hell, yes, I’m relieved. She’s better off, and so are we.’
‘The important thing, of course,’ said Truman, ‘is how we are.’
As Truman plopped glasses into the soapy water, Mordecai wrapped his hand around his tumbler, and Averil, I noted, did not have the nerve to clear Mordecai’s glass.
‘I find it a little hard to picture,’ Truman went on, his voice almost affable in a way that unnerved me. ‘You driving to buy her groceries; you listening to the day they met in the Young Democrats for the eighty millionth time; you rolling up her smelly sheets and tucking in fresh ones. So what all are you relieved of?’
‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t have changed her sheets. You would have, kid. I’m not that much of a sucker.’
Truman gripped the counter on either side of the sink, his head bowed. The veins in his hands were raised, shocks of hair on his crown standing on end like a cat’s in a corner.
‘She dunked our stinky diapers and mopped up our vomit when we were sick. She cooked supper every night and if it wasn’t always gourmet we didn’t starve. It seems fair enough to expect something in return.’ At last Truman turned his head. ‘If I’d have done it and you wouldn’t that doesn’t make me a sucker but you a cad. If it weren’t for Mother, you wouldn’t even be here.’
I had the feeling he was blaming her.
‘Shit,’ said Mordecai, rocking his chair on its back legs with his boot on the table. ‘I didn’t ask to be born, did I? She wanted to have kids, she had kids. Diapers went with the territory. I’ll tell you this, I didn’t want their favours. I wiped my own ass as soon as I was able, and at the age I could so much as turn a hamburger I walked. You’re the one who chose to stick around home until, what? Twentyeight?’ (Truman was thirty-one.) ‘You’d have cooked her strained peas, because she got you—you owed. I
didn’t. So maybe I’m relieved for you, bro. There aren’t a lot of good sides to people kicking it, but she saved you a twenty-year nightmare and I’m just suggesting you admit it.’ The front legs of his chair hit the floor.
Truman sudsed glasses furiously, though with his usual system, all the wine glasses at once, lining them on the left; he would rinse them in matching sets.
‘What she saved you,’ said Truman, ‘was money. If she’d lived longer, she’d have used up what you already seem to regard as inadequate compensation for putting up with her company an entire fourteen years of your life.’
‘All right,’ Mordecai proposed blithely. ‘You think I’m so moneygrubbing? Let me pose you a hypothetical question. Say, Mother’s dead. A fairy appears, and offers you one more evening with your mother. A whole night. There’s one catch: you have to pay for it, out of your inheritance. Now, how much would that night be worth to you, bro? Would you pay $20,000? $15,000?’
‘That’s a false dilemma,’ Truman croaked. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not real. That’s like asking who do you love more, your mother or your father, when you can love both of them.’
‘But you do love your mother or your father more, don’t you?’ pressed Mordecai. ‘Besides, my little fairy isn’t absurd. You said yourself, the longer she lived the less we got, so every night did cost money, didn’t it? You