The Best American Short Stories 2020 Read online

  * * *

  Marie-Thérèse, who’d been slowed by a degenerative disk in her lower back that made walking painful, came clumping into the kitchen one bleak February morning in the last dwindling decade of the century—​and where had the years gone?—​to slap the newspaper down on the table before him. “You see this?” she demanded, and he pushed aside his slice of buttered toast (the only thing he was able to keep down lately) to fumble for his reading glasses, which he thought he had misplaced until he discovered them hanging from the lanyard around his neck. Marie-Thérèse’s finger tapped at the photograph dominating the front page. It took him a moment to realize it was a close-up of Madame C., seated before a birthday cake the size of a truck tire, the candles atop it ablaze, as if this, finally, were her funeral pyre, but no such luck.

  Whole years had gone by during which he’d daily envisioned her death—​plotted it, even. He dreamed of poisoning her wine, pushing her down the stairs, sitting in her bird-shell lap and crushing her like an egg, all eighty-eight pounds of her, but of course, because he was civilized, he never acted on his fantasies. In truth, he’d lost contact with her over the course of the years, accepting her for what she was—​a fact of nature, like the sun that rose in the morning and the moon that rose at night—​and he was doing his best to ignore all mention of her. She’d made him the butt of a joke, and a cruel joke at that. He’d attended her 110th birthday, and then the one four years later, after she’d become the world’s oldest living human, but Marie-Thérèse had been furious (about that and practically everything else in their lives), and both his daughters had informed him he was making a public spectacle of himself, and so, finally, he’d declared himself hors de combat.

  Besides which, he had problems of his own, problems that went far deeper than where he was going to lay his head at night—​the doctor had found a spot on his lung and that spot had morphed into cancer. The treatments, radiation and chemotherapy both, had sheared every hair from his body and left him feeling weak and otherworldly. So when Marie-Thérèse thrust the paper at him and he saw the old lady grinning her imperturbable grin under the banner headline WORLD’S OLDEST LIVING PERSON TURNS 120, he felt nothing. Or practically nothing.

  “I wish she would die,” Marie-Thérèse hissed.

  He wanted to concur, wanted to hiss right back at her, So do I, but all he could do was laugh—​yes, the joke was on him, wasn’t it?—​until the laugh became a rasping, harsh cough that went on and on till his lips were bright with blood.

  Two days later he was dead.

  * * *

  At first she hadn’t the faintest idea what Martine was talking about (“Dead? Who’s dead?”), but eventually, after a painstaking disquisition that took her step by step through certain key events of the past thirty years, she was given to understand that her benefactor had been laid to rest—​or, actually, incinerated at the crematorium, an end result she was determined to avoid for herself. She was going to be buried properly, like a good Catholic. And an angel—​her guardian angel, who had seen her this far—​was going to be there at her side to take her to heaven in a golden chariot. Let the flesh rot, dust to dust; her spirit was going to soar.

  “So he’s dead, is he?” she said in the general direction of Martine. She was all but blind now, but she could see everything in her mind’s eye—​Martine, as she’d been five years ago, hunched and crabbed, an old woman herself—​and then she saw Monsieur R. as he had been all those years before, when he’d first come to her to place his bet. Suddenly she was laughing. “He made his bet; now he has to lie in it,” she said, and Martine said, “Whatever are you talking about? And what’s so funny—​he’s dead, didn’t you hear me?”

  Very faintly, as if from a distance, she heard herself say, “But his twenty-five hundred francs a month are still alive, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t—​I mean, I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “En viager. I’m still alive, aren’t I? Well, aren’t I?”

  Martine didn’t answer. The world had been reduced. But it was there still, solid, tangible, as real as the fur of the cat—​whichever cat—​that happened to be asleep in her lap, asleep, and purring.

  JASON BROWN

  A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed

  FROM The Sewanee Review

  The day before my sister’s pretend wedding, the family gathered in Maine for our annual meeting, at my grandfather’s island house, so he could tell us how much of a disappointment we’d been. Dressed like a clam digger in rubber boots, filthy canvas pants, and an old sweatshirt full of pipe ash holes, he rose from his wing chair and leveraged himself to his feet with his cane. Stains extended from his collar to his knees, because at mealtimes he used himself as a plate. Like other monarchs, he may have confused menace with majesty and mistaken the wary looks of his subjects, cowering in the wicker, for devoted affection. He delivered his judgment not in words but through his leaky blue eyes, which lingered on each one of us before coming to rest on my sister.

  “I am going to die,” he announced, and lifted Julia, his corgi, into his arms. The wicker groaned. Of course he was going to die—​at some point. He was ninety-four.

  “Are you ill?” my aunt asked. With his flushed cheeks and one bony hand gripping the cane as if it were a sword, he didn’t look sick. Just spiteful. Most years he accused us all of a failure of cheerfulness and left it at that.

  “No, there is nothing wrong with me. I’m going to die, that’s all. I am going to die on Saturday.”

  “But that’s tomorrow,” my sister said. “I’m getting married here tomorrow.”

  “You can go ahead and do whatever you want to,” he said to the far side of the room. To where my fiancée, Melissa, stood next to a row of windows framing the Atlantic Ocean. “Who is that woman?” he asked.

  Melissa raised her ink-black eyebrows and looked at me.

  “Is that why there’s a big hole in the ground?” my sister said, tipping her tennis racket west.

  We’d all noticed the hole (three feet deep, a little bigger than a coffin) on the way up from the dock, but no one had mentioned it until now in the hope that ignoring it would fill it in.

  “It’s not even in the graveyard,” my sister added.

  “You’re not putting me in the graveyard with all those people,” my grandfather said to me for some reason.

  “Those are our ancestors, and one of those people was your wife,” Uncle Alden said.

  “Is—​is my wife.”

  “You’re going to kill yourself on the day I get married?” my sister said. She and my father had distinguished themselves as the only two people to stand up to my grandfather. My father lived in Oregon and hadn’t been back to Maine for a decade.

  “Of course I am not going to kill myself.”

  “You can’t just decide to die,” my sister said.

  “I can do whatever I damned well please!”

  We all lowered our heads, except for my sister, who rolled her eyes.

  “I am getting in that hole on Saturday. And someone,” my grandfather added, nodding at me, “will cover me with dirt when I stop breathing.”

  “Why him?” Uncle Alden said. “Why does he get to bury you?”

  “Because he inherits the house. As of Saturday, the whole thing belongs to him.”

  A great sigh seemed to rise from the floorboards, and Uncle Alden’s head flopped forward. I felt dizzy and saturated, like someone who’d just downed eleven seltzer and lemons at a sports bar to prove he could sit there and not drink. At one time, before my first trip to COPE in Tucson, I’d spent every summer here on the island crammed into this eighteenth-century falling-down Cape with my sister and grandparents and cousins, all people I loved but also vaguely resented. I had always assumed that one of us—​probably my Uncle Alden—​would own it someday, but not me. I lived in Tucson and had no money.

  “As of Saturday,” my grandfather added as an
afterthought, “whatever John says goes around here.”

  Unaccustomed to power, I didn’t know if I should stand. Several cousins stormed out. A few climbed the stairs into what would apparently, as of Saturday, no longer be their bedrooms. I looked around at the old plaster, the whole house desperately clinging to the central stone chimney. A warehouse of colonial junk surrounded us: old paintings of people strangled by white collars on the walls of the parlor; a powder horn from Queen Anne’s War on the sill; sea chests full of squirrel shit; calfskin logbooks detailing encounters with storms off Cape Horn and run-ins with the native people of Sin Jamaica. Along the hewn oak beam, over a hundred corks had been nailed to mark marriages, deaths, and New Year’s Eves spent freezing by the fireplace.

  Uncle Alden, who built uncomfortable chairs out of ash, which he offered at prices that successfully deterred their purchase, and my cousins—​a couple of local teachers, a boatbuilder, and an organic farmer—​had long feared that my sister, at first some kind of banker and now I didn’t know what, would financially pick them off from her river-view condo in Manhattan and one day rebuild our sagging island house into a summer retreat for megalomaniacs. They would see my grandfather’s announcement as part of my sister’s scheme.

  “Okay,” my sister said, smiling. She raised her tennis racket and excused herself. For years she’d been the least-liked member of the family, but now that my grandfather had said he would leave the house to me, I figured the target might shift. Melissa caught my eye, and I signaled that I’d see her outside.

  With everyone else gone from the room, my grandfather took out his pipe and clamped it between his teeth. The pipe was empty. He no longer smoked, not since he’d been diagnosed with emphysema fifteen years ago. He had probably not, as he claimed, cured himself of the disease, though as he bore down on one hundred, he had no trouble biking around on his motor-assisted adult tricycles—​one for the island, one for town.

  I had not grown healthier with age either. I chose this moment to perform a self-check, which my fiancée, in her second year of graduate study in social work at the University of Arizona, had taught me to do. I could barely keep my eyes open. In response to stress, I always fell asleep. On a good day the medications I took rendered me as lethargic as a snake digesting a gopher. If not for my job and Melissa, I would’ve slept fourteen hours a day. I did not feel up to the challenge of whatever my grandfather and my sister had in mind for the weekend, and I had to will myself not to climb the stairs and lie down in my old room.

  “You can’t know what it’s like,” my grandfather said to me under his breath.

  “What?”

  “For everyone to want you dead.”

  “No one wants you dead,” I lied.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “But I appreciate the sentiment.” He tapped the empty bowl of his pipe on his palm as if to clear out yesterday’s ashes.

  * * *

  I found Melissa outside talking to my braless cousin Bayberry, who leaned against my grandfather’s island tricycle and raised her eyebrows. “Act One! Tomorrow, Act Two. Who is this man your sister’s marrying? William St. . . .”

  “William Rollo St. Launceston,” I said, reluctantly supporting the illusion that a real wedding would go down in the morning. No one else in the family knew that my sister and Rollo had already married at a secluded Maui beach a year ago. I hadn’t been invited—​no one had.

  “That’s a beautiful necklace,” Bayberry said as she leaned into Melissa’s personal space and squinted at her Our Lady of Guadalupe pendant.

  “Thanks,” Melissa said, and took a wary step back. I said goodbye to Bayberry, took Melissa by the hand, and led us down the trail. The island house was full, and the horsehair mattresses contained the bones of too many chipmunks, so I had reserved a hotel. At the Holiday Inn in Bath, I could scald all the stupid things I’d heard today out of my brain. We reached the dock and boarded my grandfather’s skiff to shuttle the quarter mile to the mainland. Sitting across from each other on bench seats, I was reminded, not for the first time, of the disconcertingly erotic fact that we were the same height, our shoulders the same width. Melissa had the softest skin on the planet, her face framed by a precision-cut bob feathering in the breeze.

  On the way up the hill to the parking lot, Melissa touched my arm with the tips of her fingers and asked me if I was going to throw up. I had thrown up the month before, for no apparent reason, at a party hosted by a friend of hers. Ever since then she’d been waiting for it to happen again. Maybe I would; I didn’t know. I turned to face the island, a low fir-topped mound ringed by jagged granite and dotted by shingled cottages. Every winter when I was young and my grandfather and I motored over from the mainland to fell a Christmas tree, steam poured off the ocean into the frigid air.

  “It’s mine,” I said, a mostly false statement, and pointed to the island. “I mean, not the whole thing,” I confessed. Though my ancestor John Josiah Howland and his wife, Fear Chipman, had swindled the island away from the Abenaki chief Mowhitiwormet, “Robinhood,” in a 1640 land deal worth a hogshead of rum and twelve pumpkins, over the years each generation lost a few acres. Now we owned only the farmhouse and the field sloping to the shore.

  Melissa, not my real fiancée, not in the sense of someone who’d agreed to marry me, looked at my forehead. Did she know how I was feeling? That how I felt depended on how she felt? When I’d asked her to marry me two months ago and she’d parried with, “I need to think about that,” I thought the trip to Maine might bring us closer together. And I had felt closer during the flight and the car ride up from Boston, so close that I had unconsciously shifted her answer into the “yes” box. Now, though, I didn’t feel close at all. Maybe she would be impressed that I was—​or soon would be—​owner of the last few acres of the family homestead.

  On the mainland, after we buckled ourselves into the Kia, I hit the gas, and we shot out of the parking space. Under stress I sometimes exhibited diminished motor control. I wondered if I was relapsing into what Melissa had once called a “disorganized attachment disorder,” DAD, the description for which she’d read aloud from the DSM-IV. I did feel “systematically disregulated”; also I felt “excessively friendly” and wished to continue expressing these feelings “in a syrupy, bizarre, ineffectual manner.”

  “We’re not rich, you know,” I said. I had jumped the reality track on the way up from Boston and now clung to the facts as a nostrum for all my natural impulses. “My sister and I grew up with my grandparents. My great-grandparents lost everything in the dowel factory in Lewiston. Anyway, you can’t understand the family without understanding my grandfather.” Neither a monarch nor (to his great relief, so he claimed) a Kennebec Journal “Local Person of Note,” he was a retired high school teacher in Vaughan, a town twenty-five miles upriver from the island. To us he was the Old Man: the name, the dog, the cane, the Silver Star nailed to the wall in the back bathroom, and, of course, the title to the house on the island, the last thing of value owned by our family.

  She put her hand on my knee. “You have boats,” she said. “You are people with boats and an island with your name on it. Where I come from, people have broken cars.” Melissa had grown up with a single mother in Douglas, Arizona, a place I privately thought of as a scary DMZ filled with guard towers, giant Border Patrol assault vehicles, and attack helicopters roaming the lunar border with Mexico.

  “But we had broken cars too,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m impressed.”

  “I don’t want you to be impressed,” I lied.

  “This is my New England vacation. A break from the heat.” Melissa traveled through time like an emotional space station that could go years without resupply. “Your eyes are weirdly geckoed,” she said.

  “I don’t feel so good.”

  Melissa covered her left ear. “Stop shouting,” she said. “I’m sitting right next to you.” (I also sometimes lost control of “my volume,” as Melissa put it.)


  “Several weeks ago, when I asked you . . . When I said I wanted to . . . When I told you I . . .” I was trying not to say love or propose, two words she objected to. “I just hope . . .”

  “To eat a lobster,” Melissa said. “Me. I do. Before I get another boat ride.” We stared out our windows for a while. “It’s exciting that the house is really yours, John Howland. Of Howland Island.”

  This sounded better than John Howland, adjunct community college instructor. Back in Arizona, where no one gave a shit about New England, I could forget all that John Howland stuff, but here the name John Howland also belonged to my grandfather and his father, et cetera, in a more or less unbroken line of Johns going back twelve generations to the John Howland who accidentally fell off the stern of the Mayflower in a storm, but thank God somehow managed to pull himself back aboard before landing at Plymouth so the rest of us could someday exist.

  “Whenever I’m back here I feel as if I should be doing something more important with my life,” I said.

  “Why, because you think you’re more important than people who do what you do?”

  Melissa didn’t understand, but I was encouraged by the way her gaze lingered on my jawline as we drove to Bath. When we first started dating, she claimed to admire my jawline. Now that I owned property, maybe we could have little John Howlands, what my grandfather had always expected. According to Melissa, I often felt so much that I had difficulty intuiting how other people felt, which didn’t bother her, she claimed, because she didn’t believe in codependency—​in taking care of my feelings or telling me how to live—​even though this was the point of a relationship? To become less partial? The other night I’d dreamed that she and I were hiking in the Tucson Mountains when a giant tire—​the kind used on mega dump trucks—​bowled over a rock, picked her up, and carried her surprised face down the side of a cactus-covered valley. I hadn’t told her about the dream yet, probably because I thought she would say that the tire represented a wedding ring and that the dream expressed my rage at her lack of desire for a conventional commitment, which I thought I wanted but she claimed I didn’t. At least not really.