Free Golden States by Michael Cunningham

succotash,” she said.
    “You don’t have to eat it,” Mom said. “Is it really that awful, going up to your father’s?”
    “No,” David said.
    “Lizzie?”
    Lizzie shook her head. “I hate succotash,” she said. “Why do we always have to have it?”
    “We haven’t had it since Valentine’s Day,” Mom said. “Listen, you just have to go to your father’s. It’s not me saying so, it’s the court.”
    “We know,” David said.
    “We know,” Lizzie added softly.
    “Well,” Mom said, and said nothing further. After a while, she asked Janet, “Are you all right over there?”
    Janet’s eyes had dried and taken on a hard sparkle. “Oh sure,” she said. “Just going through a little adjustment.”
    After dinner was finished and the dishes put away, David sat in his room working on his map of California. He heard Janet go into her room. A few minutes later Mom came upstairs and tapped on Janet’s door in her careful, determined way, as though she were breaking open the shell of a soft-boiled egg. David heard Janet’s voice and then Mom’s, clearer, saying, “Can I come in for a minute?” The door opened and closed. Mom’s voice, like Janet’s, was reduced to wordless sound; an oboe. Janet’s was a clarinet. The two of them talked on, and though David tried to hear them through the wall the words couldn’t be fathomed. He listened to the murmur of their voices, and glued foxtails and cotton balls onto the places where the state was most fruitful.
     
     
    Dad had taken up shooting when he lost his job. David remembered going with him once to a practice range, where he shot at targets tacked to bales of hay. A red ring inside a blue one, with a black circle the size of a heart at center. David had been only five or six, and Dad wouldn’t let him shoot. He remembered Dad’s hands on the shotgun—long brown fingers that might have been carved from a lighter, finer-grained wood than that of the gun. Although he saw Dad every summer, his clearest recollection was six years old or more. Dad stood with his feet wide apart, aiming the long gun, his profile intent. Sunlight picked out each red hair on his head, and a white aura outlined his hooked nose and heavy, square chin. David had never seen him so still before. For a long moment he was able to look at Dad’s face as intently as he examined his own body. Dad’s eyebrow, darker red than his hair, the color of an Irish setter’s coat, had a single thread of white in it which David had never seen. A giddiness had risen from his belly to his head, the same tingling weightlessness he felt going over the top of a ferris wheel. He loved Dad. The gun cracked, a sharp clean sound. After he was through, Dad gave David the target for a souvenir. The target had five ragged holes shot through its small black center. It was still taped up on David’s wall, by the bed, five dots of white plaster shining through the black like stars.
     
     
    Janet went swimming again that night, as he’d thought she would. He waited up for her, watching, after Mom and Lizzie had gone to bed. He stayed on guard and did not beat off.
    This time Janet wore her bathing suit, which looked gray in the darkness, and carried a towel draped over her shoulders like an athlete in a locker room. When she dove, the splash she made lingered surface. David could see the suggestion of her shape, blue-white, as she swam a lap underwater. Before she surfaced, he was downstairs. As he passed through the kitchen, his belly went queasy with anticipation. The pilot lights on the rangetop glowed blue, like the light on television, and for a moment in passing them he was a photograph of himself, moving through a picture of his kitchen. He stepped outside into the smell of the damp grass and the disturbed water, and the sound of Janet’s breathing.
    He stood for a while beside the pool, waiting for her to see him, but she swam with her head down, grinding out the laps. Finally, David peeled off