Read A Perfectly Good Family for Free Online Page B

thing.
    ‘I’ll never forget,’ he began on a second Bud, ‘dinner at your parents’, oh, fifteen years back. I’d litigated a case, see—some arthritic biddy over in Cary with a fair stack of cash in the mattress had been tended by a black maid for years. Since her kids hadn’t been giving her the time of day, the lady’d changed her
will and left lock, stock, and barrel to the maid. Seems they’d become good friends, in a funny way. I’d made the amendments myself, but once the old bird kicked it, the kids started to squawk. Challenged their momma’s competence. In court, the new will was invalidated, and I lost the case. Felt terrible about it. Sent the maid to your dad for the appeal. No question as to that jury’s logic: any dowager of good Southern breeding who left her house to nigger help—pardon my French—was off her rocker. But since the old bat had been hearing the occasional voice, proving racial bias was living hell.
    ‘Point being, Sturges and I had been working long and late and I was plumb tuckered. So we knock off and your mother cracks open a fresh bottle of apple juice—’
    I laughed. ‘The Hard Stuff.’
    ‘My nose got shoved so far out of joint,’ he admitted, ‘that I asked for a beer. Eugenia looked at me as if I’d farted.’
‘My mother thinks beer is low class.’
‘So we sipped our apple juice and then came the nubs of cheddar from the bottom of the drawer—’
‘With the mould scraped off.’
‘Not all the mould scraped off. Sturges cranked up the sound-track to 2001, when I had a yen for Ry Cooder. I thought maybe we’d get around to the Series, but over the trombones your Dad started shouting about third-world debt. Then it hit me: Strauss, stale crackers, hard cheese and guilty politics—this was Sturges McCrea’s idea of a good time .’
That’s when the idea first entered my head that my parents might be tiresome to other people.
    Averil pouted at being left behind, but the will-reading was for immediate family only. I paused at my parents’ Volvo, while Truman lurched to the driver’s seat. I’ll drive if you like, I offered, and he said no that’s all right and I clued that he always drove, never mind that this car now was a third mine. I sensed a burgeoning attitude problem.
    ‘Can we agree to ditch Mordecai after the meeting?’ Truman proposed at the wheel.
‘We might have dinner. He’s your only brother, he lives a mile away from you, and you’ve seen him twice in two years. For funerals.’
‘He’s a bore and a know-it-all and he ignores me. He never fails to make some snide crack about my being in school, and then we have to listen for hours about the future of digital recording.’
I would happily describe my brothers’ relationship to each other, except that they don’t have one.
‘A single evening won’t kill you.’ That was that. With Truman, I am sufficiently accustomed to having my way that I don’t even notice when I get it.
We parked on Hillsborough, a leafy and majestic street in summer, T-junctioning into the state capitol, but looking the worse for wear with dogwoods and black walnuts too bare to obscure the failing businesses behind them. Downtown Raleigh was crumbling and dispirited, though like my parents’ kitchen I was glad it had not been done up. Several tower blocks broke the skyline, but for the most part Raleigh’s architecture had stayed lowlying, and Hillsborough was still lined with pipe shops, diners serving grits and black-eyed gravy, and the flagging Charcoal Grill. The rest of this town had multiplied threefold since I’d lived here, its perimeters bleeding to Durham and Chapel Hill, so it was comforting to find a stretch like this one that hadn’t changed much.
There was one more bit of landscape that hadn’t changed much.
I had to smile. Two blocks down, in silhouette he might be mistaken for my father, with that distinctive side-to-side swagger and groundeating galumph. But my father’s purposeful