Read Online Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow - Free Book Online Page B

chiropractor now, even though his back feels as good as it has in years. His Gran will be checking up on it.
    "Bye, Arthur. I love you."
    "Bye, Gran."
    "Bye."
    He shakes his head and holsters the comm back in his pants, then rocks back and lies down on the rug, facing the ceiling, eyes closed. A moment later, the hem of Linda's robe brushes his arm and she lies down next to him, takes his hand.
    "Everything OK?"
    "It's just my Gran." And he tells her about this date's significance.
    "How did she die?"
    "It was stupid. She slipped in the tub and cracked her skull on the tap. I was off at a friend's place for the weekend and no one found her for two days. She lived for a week on life support, and they pulled the plug. No brain activity. They wouldn't let me into the hospital room after the first day. My Gran practically moved in, though. She raised me after that. I think that if she hadn't had to take care of me, she would have just given up, you know? She's pretty lonely back home alone."
    "What about your dad?"
    "You know, there used to be a big mystery about that. Gran and Mom, they were always tragic and secretive when I asked them about him. I had lots of stories to explain his absence: ran off with another woman, thrown in jail for running guns, murdered in a bar fight. I used to be a bit of a celeb at school -- lots of kids didn't have dads around, but they all knew where their fathers were. We could always kill an afternoon making up his who and where and why. Even the teachers got into it, getting all apologetic when we had to do a genealogy project. I found out the truth, finally, when I was nineteen. Just looked it up online. It never occurred to me that my mom would be that secretive about something that was so easy to find out, so I never bothered."
    "So, what happened to him?"
    "Oh, you know. He and mom split when I was a kid. He moved back in with his folks in a little town in the Thousand Islands, near Ottawa. Four or five years later, he got a job planting trees for a summer up north, and he drowned swimming in a lake during a party. By the time I found out about him, his folks were dead, too."
    "Did you tell your friends about him, once you found out?"
    "Oh, by then I'd lost touch with most of them. After elementary school, we moved across town, to a condo my grandmother retired into on the lakeshore, out in the suburbs. In high school, I didn't really chum around much, so there wasn't anyone to talk to. I did tell my Gran though, asked her why it was such a big secret, and she said it wasn't, she said she'd told me years before, but she hadn't. I think that she and Mom just decided to wait until I was older before telling me, and then after my mom died, she just forgot that she hadn't told me. We got into a big fight over that."
    "That's a weird story, dude. So, do you think of yourself as an orphan?"
    Art rolls over on his side, face inches from hers, and snorts a laugh. "God, that's so -- *Dickensian*. No one ever asked me that before. I don't think so. You can't really be an adult and be an orphan -- you're just someone with dead parents. And I didn't find out about my dad until I was older, so I always figured that he was alive and well somewhere. What about your folks?"
    Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art is aroused by it, but not crazily so -- somewhere in telling his story, he's figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they're just getting through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh. She follows his eyes and smiles at him, then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.
    "I told you about my mom, right? Wanted to act -- who doesn't? But she was too conscious of the cliche to mope about it. She got some little parts -- nothing fab, then went on to work at a Sony