Read Online You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard - Free Book Online Page A

We always lived by the maxim that things last longer mended than new. My whole life, I heard that with thrift and hard work I could build a mansion. My father had a typewritten note tacked to the wall in his office at home:
Let those with abundance remember that they are surrounded by thorns
.
    â€œWho said
that
?” Cato asked when we were going through his belongings.
    â€œCalvin,” I told her.
    â€œWell, you would know,” she said.
    He hadn’t been so much a conservative as a man whose life philosophy had boiled down to the principle of no nonsense. I’d noticed even as a tiny boy that whenever he liked a business associate, or anyone else, that’s what he said about them.
    My mother’s got her nose to the glass at this point. “You think you’re the only one with secrets,” she remarks.
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, but she acts as though she’s not going to dignify that with a response. Follow-up questions don’t get anywhere, either. I sit with her a while longer. We watch a Chinese game show. I soak her bread in milk, walk her to the toilet, and tell her we have to at least think about moving her bed downstairs somewhere. The steps to her second floor are vertiginous even by Dutch standards, and the risers accommodate less than half your foot. She makes an effort to follow what I’m saying, puzzled that she needs to puzzle something out. But then her expression dissipates and she complains she spent half the night looking for the coffee grinder.
    â€œWhy were you looking for the coffee grinder?” I ask, a question I have to repeat. Then I stop, for fear of frightening her.
    Henk’s class is viewing a presentation at the Climate campus—“Water: Precious Resource and Deadly Companion”—so we have the dinner table to ourselves. Since Cato’s day was even longer than mine, I prepared the meal, two cans of pea soup with pigs’ knucklesand some Belgian beer, but she’s too tired to complain. She’s dealing with both the Americans, who are always hectoring for clarification on the changing risk factors for our projects in Miami and New Orleans, and the Germans, who’ve publicly dug in their heels on the issue of accepting any spillover from the Rhine in order to take some of the pressure off the situation downstream.
    It’s the usual debate, as far as the latter argument’s concerned. We take the high road—it’s only through cooperation that we can face such monumental challenges, etc.—while other countries scoff at our aspirations toward ever more comprehensive safety measures. The German foreign minister last year accused us on a simulcast of acting like old women.
    â€œMaybe he’s right,” Cato says wearily. “Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live in a country where you don’t need a license to build a fence around your garden.”
    Exasperated, we indulge in a little Dutch bashing. No one complains about themselves as well as the Dutch. Cato asks if I remember that story about the manufacturers having to certify that each of the chocolate letters handed out by Santa Claus contained an equal amount of chocolate. I remind her about the number-one download of the year turning out to have been of
fireworks sound effects
, for those New Year’s revelers who found real fireworks too worrisome.
    After we stop, she looks at me, her mouth a little slack. “Why does this sort of thing make us horny?” she wonders.
    â€œMaybe it’s the pea soup,” I tell her in the shower. She’s examining little crescents of fingernail marks where she held me when she came. Then she turns off the water and we wrap ourselves in the bedsheet-sized towel she had made in Surinam. Cocooned on the floor in the tiny, steamy bathroom we discuss Kees’s love life. He now shops at a singles’ supermarket, the kind where you use a blue basket if