Read Online The Wonder of All Things by Jason Mott - Free Book Online Page A

Perhaps it had been the sound of the dogs barking that had made it take so long, or perhaps it was the early hour—the sun had only just broken the sky and the world was still gold and amber and sluggish in the new day—or perhaps it was simply that he had not heard the man’s voice in nearly six years.
    “Dad?” Wash called, stepping out of his bedroom.
    “Hell,” Brenda said.
    Wash’s father was a tall man, tall and thin and with more wrinkles than Wash remembered. The scar on the side of his face—a memento from the car accident that took Wash’s mother—was still there, a stark and off-putting wound that seemed to twist and contort into a new version of itself whenever the man smiled.
    “Hey there, son,” Wash’s father said as the boy entered the living room.
    “What are you doing back here, Tom?” Brenda said. There was a mixture of civility and hardness in her voice, like snow draped over a wall of ice. “I suppose I could take a guess and, likely as not, that guess would be right, but I’d much rather hear you say it. I’d rather hear how you frame it, as folks say.”
    “Don’t do this, Brenda,” Tom said. He shifted his stance, and continued to look past the woman and at Wash.
    “How have you been?” Wash asked.
    “Good,” Tom said. “Boy...you’ve gotten so big. Handsome, too. You’re thirteen now.” He declared the fact, as if to prove that he had kept proper count in the years since he had last seen his son. “I imagine you’ve got a girlfriend. And if you don’t, then you’re not far off.”
    “No,” Wash replied, blushing.
    “Keeping your options open, then?” Tom asked. He laughed awkwardly in the silence that fell between them. “You got your whole life ahead of you, son. A long time to find out about women.”
    “I guess,” Wash said.
    “You watch the news much, Tom?” Brenda asked. “Is that why you’re asking about Wash’s love life?” The smile on the man’s face receded.
    “I suppose there was never any hope of this going smooth, was there, Brenda?”
    “Can’t rightly say,” Brenda said. “I suppose it’s got to go the way you’ve set it up to go. This is the way you’ve made things.”
    “Grandma...” Wash said.
    “I’m trying,” Tom said.
    “Of course you’re trying now,” Brenda replied, her voice rising. “There’s something to be gained.”
    “It’s not like that.”
    “How the hell else is it, then? You ain’t had time for him in years, and now you do. Can’t you see how I might find that just a little suspicious?”
    “I’m trying,” Tom said again, his voice harder.
    “Grandma,” Wash said.
    “You should have stayed away,” Brenda said. “When’s the last time you had a drink?”
    “He’s my son,” Tom replied. “Dammit, Brenda, he almost died.”
    “That’s right,” she replied. “Your son almost died, Tom. And you weren’t there.”
    “Grandma!”
    The room went silent, and Wash felt a palpable heat between the three of them, as if the door to a furnace, long kept shut, had finally been opened. His grandmother stood tall and still. She scowled at Wash’s father, as if she could make the earth open up and swallow him.
    But Tom remained there at her door, waiting, with an echo of Wash’s face hidden in the architecture of his own.
    It took a little more time and arguing but, in the end, Brenda conceded to letting Wash and Tom spend the afternoon alone together, just so long as they didn’t stray too far from the house and so long as they didn’t take Tom’s car. “No farther than you can limp off,” Brenda had said to the pair. “Doctors say he’s okay, but I’m not convinced. And the last thing I need is for him to have an episode and for me not to be there.” When Tom asked what she was afraid might happen to the boy, Brenda would only reply, “If a person could predict the unexpected, it wouldn’t be the unexpected, now would it?”
    “I suppose not,” Tom said.
    “And don’t be gone