Read Online The Whore's Child by Richard Russo - Free Book Online Page A

window, I join them on the deck.
    “How much do you have in your checking account?” I ask our daughter.
    She blinks.
    “How much?” I say.
    “Not a lot,” she says. “There’s never much. A couple hundred dollars maybe.”
    “Write me a check,” I say. “I’ll take him to the airport.”
    “You want me to pay for it?” Julie says.
    “You want
me
to?”
    “Hank—” Faye starts.
    But I’m not about to budge on this one. I’ll loan her money later, or give it to her if I have to, but if she wants Russell on a plane, she’s going to experience at least the appearance of paying for it.
    Julie fetches the checkbook from the drawer in the kitchen. Though she hates the idea, she writes the check anyway. I look it over, then slip it in my pocket.
    “He’s at the bedroom window staring at us,” Julie whispers. “Don’t look.”
    I don’t intend to.
    It’s forty-five minutes to Bradley International. I tell Russell to take it easy. After all, it’s not like we’re trying to catch any particular flight. Where I will send Russell is one of the many things we have not discussed. Why he has struck my daughter is another. More than anything, I’m afraid he’ll tell me what’s wrong with my daughter, and why their lives together went wrong.
    I know too much already. Knew, in fact, as soon as I saw my house taking shape on their lot, knowing that this wasn’t Russell’s idea, that if Russell had his way they’d be living in New Haven in an apartment, spending their money in restaurants, on the occasional train into New York, the theater, maybe, or a cruise around the island. The sort of things you have a ticket stub to show for when you’re finished. It would take him a decade or so to want something more permanent, and even then it would be against his better instincts. He didn’t need a house right now and he certainly didn’t need a replica of mine. When we drove away, he hadn’t even looked back at it.
    I know all this better than he does. He probably imagines that whatever it is that’s between him and Julie is more immediate. He may even think he’s a bad lover or a bad person. I doubt he likes what he’s thinking as the Connecticut countryside flies by and recedes behind us liked a welched promise. I’d asked if he minded driving, and he said why should he. Why indeed? It’s his car.
    “It’s funny,” he finally says when we hit I-91.
    “Please, Russell,” I beg him. “Don’t tell me what’s funny.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it won’t be.”
    “What’s funny is . . . I’m relieved.”
    “See what I mean?”
    “No, seriously,” he says. I suspect he doesn’t know what serious means, though he’s learning. “Ever since last night I’ve been trying to figure out some way to punish myself. Now I can leave the whole thing in your capable hands. You’re about the most capable man I’ve ever known, Hank. I don’t mind saying it’s been a bitch competing with you.”
    I can’t think what to say to this, but I have to admit, now that I’ve heard him out, that it
is
funny. “I hope you won’t misconstrue my running you out of town as not liking you, Russell.”
    We both smile at that.
    “Were you and Faye ever unhappy?” he asks.
    “Together or separately?”
    “Together.”
    “Sure.”
    He thinks about this for a minute. “I bet that’s not true,” he says. “I bet you’re just saying it for one of your famous philosophical reasons, like happiness just isn’t in the cards for human beings, the sort of thing guys like you say to college students in your late afternoon classes before you go home and spend a happy evening in front of the television.”
    There is a curious mixture of wisdom and naïveté in this observation, and it makes me even sadder to be putting Russell on a plane.
    “Julie always says that’s what she had in mind for us. To be as happy as you guys.”
    Once again I am aghast at how little my daughter knows me, at what a desert her