Free The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin Page B

a boy my own age, so innocent was I of the facts of life. But all hope evaporated at the sight of my father helping my mother from the truck and into our house. There would be no baby, not then, not ever. She could hardly walk, and her skin was so colorless it seemed transparent, as I believed a ghost might look. She hugged me weakly and went up to bed, and all through the winter this weakness did not abate but seemed to widen around her like rings, so that the household fell into a kind of trance, as if we were all lost in a forest, though not together. She could not bring herself to read her novels or play the piano or do any of the things she loved, and when, in August, she began to cough and then to bleed again, this seemed not so much a new development as a continuation of the same decline.
    She died the next January, in my parents’ bedroom, on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and breathtaking cold-a day that I imagine was not all that different from the day eight years earlier when my father had climbed the roof of the lodge and found his life. I had been sent to the Rawlings’ for the afternoon-by this time I spent so much time at their house that I had a bedroom of my own-and when my father came to fetch me at five o’clock, the appointed hour, and instead of simply honking the horn of the truck from the Rawlings’ driveway as he always did, he came into the kitchen and sat at the old oak table and removed his hat and gloves without saying a word, the cold of the outside air clinging to his coat like the smell of cigarettes that followed him everywhere, I knew what had happened without exactly knowing it-I felt it in my bones. I was working on a model kit, a B-17 Flying Fortress. I showed it to him, the landing gear that dropped from the plane’s belly to snap into place, the swiveling gun turrets and ailerons, the opening bomb-bay doors. I had taken up the toys of war initially to please him, thinking it was something the two of us might share. But in the year of my mother’s illness, I had found myself alone with this interest, just as I had found myself alone with everything else.
    My father examined the plane indifferently, saying nothing, then returned it to its place on the table. I realized then that Mrs. Rawling had stepped from the room; she had left us alone.
    “Something has happened, Joey.”
    I had taken out a tiny brush and begun to stroke paint on the plane’s fuselage.
    “Joey, are you listening to me?”
    “I want to fight in a war,” I said, still painting.
    He gave a startled laugh. “Believe me, you don’t. That’s the last thing you want.”
    “You did.”
    “That’s how I know. Joey, put that goddamn thing down, please.”
    I began to, or thought I had, but before I could do this he grabbed the plane from my hand and slammed it onto the newspaper so hard that the wheels snapped off and shot in opposite directions across the kitchen.
    “You broke it!”
    “Joey, forget the plane. Sweet Jesus Christ. It’s a fucking toy.”
    I had never heard him talk this way-not just the words themselves, but the measured anger of their delivery, like the sound of an axe blade grinding on a stone. I thought he might actually hit me, something else he had never done before.
    “I have something to tell you. Your mother has died. Do you understand what this means? She was very sick, and she has passed away.”
    “You broke my plane, you asshole!”
    And then he did hit me, once, with the back of his hand. He was a strong man, and if he had allowed his anger to do as it liked, he probably would have broken my nose. But even as his hand caught me across the cheek-a solid snap that unscrewed my eyes and sent me tumbling backward from my chair-I felt beneath this blow not only his anger but also his restraint, a force even more terrifying, for it was something he commanded. This is exactly the kind of blow you deserve, it said.
    “Get up,” he said.
    I lifted my face to see Mrs. Rawling in the