Read Online A Perfectly Good Family by Lionel Shriver - Free Book Online Page A

figure in his head.
‘Or,’ said Truman slowly, ‘if Corlis and I buy you out.’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Mordecai shut the Britannica on his tobacco threads and tossed it on the floor, where its spine bent at an uncomfortable angle like an accident victim you aren’t supposed to move. He leaned forward and tapped ash on the carpet. ‘Here’s a cheque, buddy, now run along and we’ll pretend we never met.’
‘Maybe we haven’t,’ said Truman tersely.
‘Buy me out is exactly what Mother and Father did, for years, and got off cheap at that. And now look—even dead, they want it back.’
Finally Truman looked up from the invoice. ‘Nobody kicked you out, you left. You never wanted to be a part of our family, and you weren’t a part of it, so take your thirty pieces of silver and leave us alone.’
Truman’s muscles were straining the shoulders of his green workshirt, whereas Mordecai’s shirt only strained at the buttons above his belt. Of the two, Truman was technically much stronger. Yet in the face of the older’s impervious relaxation and bemused little smile, Truman may as well have been lofting rubber darts at a tank.
Mordecai reached for the woven celadon vase on the coffee table, turning from his brother as if neglecting an annoying bee that is not worth the trouble of pursuing and swatting at all over the room. ‘What’s this from?’ he asked me, bouncing the ceramic from hand to hand like a basketball.
‘Oh, some Korean gratuity…’ I stuttered, nervous for it, and feeling apologetic for my parents’ trinkets.
‘So this is part of my inheritance ?’ he enquired, still hefting the pot back and forth.
‘Lucky you,’ I said.
Without further ado, he palmed the vase as if for a free throw, and launched it past Truman’s nose to the far corner. It smashed into a hundred pieces with a sound as if an entire china cabinet had pitched on its face. Then Mordecai stood to arch his eyebrows at me, holding his empty tumbler upside-down by way of complaint.
‘Maybe,’ I said unsteadily, ‘it’s time to make dinner.’
    I had learned from my mother to employ food as a proxy in domestic relations, just as Truman had detoured his complex affections for his family into a simpler alliance with our architecture. At least as we four bustled over cutting boards, the chop of cleavers and scrape of spoons filled what would have been, for fifteen minutes, numbed silence.
    It may be sissy of me, but I’ve always been fascinated by how people cook. Take Averil, for instance: I gave her the job of making garlic bread. Easy, right? And quick. But no. First off, she adds a timorous amount of garlic to the butter, and has to be bullied into pressing several more cloves. She mashes the butter for ten minutes, mortified by the prospect of an unbroken clump startling an innocent diner with a burst of zing. When she advances to the baguettes, she saws the bread slowly as wood, and dithers the blade back and forth after every slice before committing to another, intent on identical twins. When in mid-loaf she severs it in half instead of cutting just to the bottom crust, she lets the knife droop dejectedly as if she has just failed a geometry test. Buttering, she dabs and peers and dabs, until I find it too excruciating to watch further. In the time it takes her to make garlic bread, the whole rest of the meal will have been prepared and the table set.
    Averil was daunted by food, along with a great deal else. That she was a substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system suggested that I had either over-estimated the significance of garlic bread or underestimated the unruliness of North Carolinian teenagers. In the kitchen, she was always looking over her shoulder to make sure she’d done nothing wrong. She wanted to please the food itself, to earn its approval; perhaps someone in her childhood had delivered draconian punishments for piddling mistakes. Of flavour in general she was leary, her