Free A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver Page B

haven’t answered me. How much would the hand-squeezing and hot cocoa be worth to you? $1,000? $500? Ten bucks ?’
‘I’d pay anything!’ Truman cried.
‘Are you so sure? I’ve looked at Garrison’s figures. You and my sister here want to buy me out of my birthright, ain’t that so? Bribe me with a bowl of soup?’ (Even Mordecai had been forced to go to Sunday school.) ‘The way I see it, you two already don’t quite have the cash to send both me and the ACLU packing. So what if this one golden evening with Mommy—her arms around your neck, asking how your day went, patting your head and slipping you a big dish of ice cream—cost you just enough money that you had to sell the house? What if keeping your mother around a tiny bit longer meant you lost your beloved fucking house? Would you take the trade? Really ?’
Truman took one of the unrinsed wine glasses and threw it on the floor. ‘Get out!’ he shouted.
Yet it was obvious to all present that stressing a point by breaking crockery was derivative. Earlier in the evening, Mordecai had smashed an object of far greater value that made a much more splendid crash.
Mordecai stood and poured himself one more measure of aquavit; its caraway effluvium made me woozy.
‘Something of an accomplishment growing up in this lofty loony bin,’ he announced, ‘I live in a world of balance sheets. I understand that everything costs, and I mean costs money. Even sentimentality you’ve gotta pay for. So if you’re going to go all wobbly over this house here, you’re going to have to fork out, OK? And you haven’t got all day. No way am I going to wait around for eons while you figure out how to save this dump. I’m going to Garrison next week to file for partition. The clock’s ticking, kid. This firetrap is going on the market whether you like it or not. Maybe it’ll go for three-eighty, maybe more. Maybe you and Corrie Lou can bid high enough for it, maybe not. Only one way to find out.’
He knocked back the last of his liquor, and capped the bottle to go. ‘I’ve got to get to work. I’ll just leave you with the thought, kid: Would you swap your house for your mother? And be honest .’
The back door slammed on an ugly question, since in a sense, as Mordecai well knew, Truman had replaced his mother with a house. While she was alive, he had lavished more abundant attention on this structure than he had on her, so that when Truman tenderly retouched baseboards and caulked the bath I suspect she was jealous.
Truman finished the dishes in silence, while I wiped the table with the new sponge we’d bought that afternoon. He swept up the broken wine glass, searching out the least splinter, and left to collect shards of celadon in the parlour.
Meanwhile I tried to jolly him, saying don’t worry about HeckAndrews going up for auction, we’ll swing the price tag, whatever, and maybe Mordecai’s right, we should get this property settled, but I got no reaction. Truman looked desperate when there was nothing left to wash, and finally sat with Averil and me for a last glass of wine.
‘Are you relieved,’ Truman asked me, ‘that she didn’t live a long time?’
‘Of course not.’
He slumped. ‘I am.’
‘Oh?’
‘What Mordecai said,’ he proceeded morbidly, rubbing his eye with the back of his hand. ‘I’d thought about it. I was afraid she’d live forever. You’d be in England…Mordecai’s no use…I’d have been stuck. And now I got out of it, didn’t I?’
‘You’re whipping yourself,’ I said. ‘Give it a rest.’
‘You don’t know what it was like,’ said Averil. ‘The last two years. She never left us alone. She was always baking us pies.’
‘How terrible,’ I said.
‘Well, we don’t eat pies!’ said Averil. ‘She was fat. She wanted us to be fat, too. If I even left the crust, she’d slam cupboards.’
Averil was right. When Mother handed my father half her slice, you could see her calculating that if her husband ate three times