The Best American Short Stories 2020 Read online

  * * *

  In the morning I motored us back across to the island. Melissa held our hotel coffees and asked me when she would get to meet my parents. My parents hadn’t been invited to the wedding. I’d told her several times that when my sister and I were young my parents alternated living in the house and with their back-to-the-land friends who “farmed” on a commune. After my mother ended up leaving for Mexico and my father for Oregon, my sister and I moved in with my grandparents. I hoped that reminding Melissa of my tragic story (that my parents had abandoned us) would keep me in the running as someone who had suffered enough for her to take seriously.

  On the island dock, we sipped our coffee. Melissa gazed at the distant ocean with, I hoped, an Austenian longing for a life partner. All evidence to the contrary, Melissa longed for normal attachments. I knew she did. She had a tiny mole on her chin I liked to touch with the tip of my tongue while we made love. She pointed to a lobster boat loaded with nervous New York types leaving the mainland’s dock and heading to another, larger, private dock my sister had arranged to borrow on the island.

  “Is that a real lobster boat? Are there lobsters in that boat right now?” she asked. I answered that it probably was real even though half the workboats around the bay were fitted with lawn chairs rather than pot haulers. I pictured the two of us pulling up to the island dock in our own lobster boat (one that had been used for actual lobstering) with two kids sitting in the stern. We’d walk up to the house—​our house—​carrying those canvas tote bags summer people loved so much. In the fall we’d bake fish and play cribbage in front of the fire at night.

  As we walked up the ramp, Melissa said, “Let me ask this: Do you think your sister will be mad that I didn’t wear a dress?”

  The idea of inheriting the house and the occasion of the wedding, fake or not, had gacked me out a bit. My thoughts unspooled faster than I could gather them up, and I was suddenly, unjustifiably elated and optimistic about the future. “I think I want us to move here and have a family.” I stopped walking next to one of the graveyards filled with my ancestors.

  Melissa seemed to be considering the pine trees and the field up ahead.

  “This is my home,” I continued. My eyelashes Velcroed together. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed it.

  “You know,” Melissa said with a grin that reminded me too much of how my sister had looked at my grandfather the day before, “you’re not a nine-year-old.”

  “I need to talk about our relationship,” I said.

  “You mean the relationship you could just as easily have with a life-sized cutout of my body?” She widened her eyes and dangled her elbows in the air like a marionette. I didn’t laugh. “Don’t worry.” She sighed. “I like you. You can be fun.”

  “I’m not fun,” I said. I wanted her to understand I was angry, but I didn’t want to take any responsibility for being angry.

  “Not right now, you’re not.” She began walking again. “Look, John, in your own selfish way, you really care about people. And you can be more generous than me without meaning to. I admire that about you.”

  “You do?”

  “My friend has a theory about why I like you.” The apostrophe forming in the corner of her mouth forewarned me: either she was about to joke with me or say something depressing. Or both.

  “You had something I never had.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A childhood.” She stopped again. “And this is where it happened,” she said, pointing to Devereux’s Field. The grass leaned over in the breeze. When I turned back to her, she was no longer grinning. “It’s exactly what I pictured. You want to live here?” she said, a small crack opening in her normally steady voice. “What’re we going to do for money, raise sheep?”

  What were we going to do for money? I had no answer. I could barely pay my rent in Tucson, and I had no job in Maine. I couldn’t afford to maintain a falling-down island farmhouse or even pay the taxes. If I tried to sell it, no one in the family would speak to me again. If we moved here, Melissa and I wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves, never mind a child. The house only had hay, seaweed, and horsehair for insulation against the winter storms.

  “Do you think they will serve lobster at the reception?” Melissa asked.

  My sister stalked out of the trees on the trail and, pointing at me, started speaking while she was still fifty yards away.

  “I need you to talk to our grandfather,” she said. “He’s out there in the woods somewhere like a rabid animal. We can’t have him crawling into that hole. You don’t think he’ll really get in the hole, do you? You are in charge of the Old Man.” Now that she was standing before me, she poked my chest. To most of the family, my sister represented Greed, Ambition, Aggression. Striving constituted an unforgivable sin to those of us who believed ourselves chosen a priori and therefore beyond the indignity of scrabbling after the very things without which, of course, one found it difficult to feel chosen.

  She looked over her shoulder. “Most of the family except the hippies have decided to boycott the wedding because they think we’re pulling some kind of power move to take over the house.”

  “Did you say we just now?” I asked.

  “Everyone knows Mainwaring is actually gay, and Stoughton’s already got two daughters and had the snip, I think. You’re the last John Howland, and not only that: you’re the last chance at another John Howland—​not that I care. But if the Old Man gives the house to everyone, it will be sold, because everyone but me lives on minimum fucking wage. My name should be John Howland, for Christ’s sake. That would solve a lot of problems.” Like the Old Man, my sister had gone to Harvard. He talked slowly, with silent r’s, while she (when she wasn’t cursing like a fisherman) usually talked rapidly in lilting hyper-articulate blocks of prose.

  “Didn’t your grandfather just give the house to John?” Melissa asked, and looped her arm around mine.

  My sister, her bright blond hair twitching, looked briefly surprised that Melissa had spoken. Though physically smaller, my sister radiated a sense of imminent invasion. “But he can’t afford to pay the taxes on the house, can he?” my sister said, “so he’ll need a partner.”

  When she moved to Manhattan—​where, the rest of us were constantly reminded, the brightest people on the planet convened to congratulate each other—​my sister lost interest in “Poison Oak Rock,” as she called the island, because our Salem witch trials history didn’t play well. But in the last few years trends had shifted. Now Martha Stewart, born Martha Kostyra, didn’t cut it in an authenticity-scarce environment. My sister, Bridget Anne Hutchinson Howland, eleventh great-granddaughter of persecuted religious fanatic Anne Hutchinson and twelfth great-granddaughter of Mayflower passenger John Howland, was a veritable sui generis snow leopard. I couldn’t listen to my sister talk about her business (or about anything, really), but maybe she had a point about the house—​I would need a partner. My sister and I would own the house fifty-fifty, and she would pay Melissa and me to be caretakers. It could work. We could blow insulation into the walls.

  “When you talk to my friends during the wedding,” my sister said with her eyes fluttering closed, “about yourself, say less. Professor Howland, maybe. Leave out your trips to rehab, the community college stuff, that you live in the third world of our own country.” She looked at Melissa for a moment and rolled her eyes so quickly she might have only blinked. Then she pivoted and, legs scissoring, stalked across the field toward the house.

  “I do feel sorry for you,” Melissa said, and put her hand on my back. “Having to grow up with that.”

  “She wasn’t always this way,” I explained. “Do you really feel sorry for me?”

  “Not really,” she said, which could mean she really did, or it meant nothing. We walked toward the house. It was a major concession for her to say she felt sorry for me, even as a joke.

  To the right of the house, Uncle Alden and my cousin Mainwaring stood with their hands in their pa
nts pockets looking into the hole. A dog belonging to one of the wedding guests had fallen in. As far as I could tell, Uncle Alden kept promising to help but then continued to study the situation instead. The woman who seemed to own the dog repeatedly reached down but then, from obvious fear of falling in, backed away before she could grab the dog’s collar.

  “What did your sister say to the Old Man?” Uncle Alden whispered to me. Melissa pointed to where she would wait for me in the field and kept walking.

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, still whispering. Uncle Alden pulled the tie out of his ponytail and tucked gray hair behind his ear. Strands fell beside his face and stuck to his lips. Uncle Alden had been doing a lot to take care of my grandfather, and he clearly hoped he might inherit the house. Probably he should have.

  “I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he said as he pulled me aside. I’d never understood what about me inspired family members to blurt out confessions. “It had something to do with psychological history. With my grandfather. We weren’t supposed—​we weren’t allowed—​to succeed at anything. Do you know what I mean?” I nodded, thinking of his uncomfortable chairs and the year he’d spent in the brig for refusing to cut his hair and go to Vietnam. Then I suddenly worried about the consequences of Melissa not having a good time and maybe not getting a lobster today. I looked around, but she had disappeared.

  “I think the Old Man might’ve really lost his mind,” my uncle said.

  “It could be.”

  “He shouldn’t be living in that big house in Vaughan by himself or coming down to the island alone. And this business with the hole in the ground and giving the house to you.”

  “What am I supposed to say? The house doesn’t belong to me.”

  “He needs our help.” Uncle Alden laid his fingers on my arm and left them there. I didn’t know what to do—​we didn’t really touch each other in our family. “But he doesn’t know how to ask for it,” my uncle said. I thought of the story my grandmother had told of how my grandfather had jumped over the side of the Higgins boat at Omaha and advanced up the beach with the tide by keeping his head under the surface of the water except to come up for air.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “So you’ll talk to him about it?”

  “Let’s see what happens,” I said, and removed my arm from his grasp. Before he could touch me again, I strode recklessly toward a crowd of men in the field with wind-fairing hairdos. Hired people in black outfits rushed around with trays of champagne. Except for the mosquitoes, my sister had King Canuted the perfect conditions—​bright blue sky with a few decorative cotton-candy wisps, the ocean covered with tinsel sparkles. Barren islands guarded the mouth of the bay, Hendricks Head Lighthouse right in the center of the view like a Hopper painting.

  I saw Melissa at the far end of the field leaning against a tree and talking to a guy whose bald head shone in the light. Without eyebrows, he looked like a cross between a harbor seal and a penis. The guy before the guy she was with before me had been bald. I stopped in my tracks and watched her face and body language. Her curved lips (amazing lips!) pursed and her canted hip bumped slightly against the bark.

  My grandfather stood at the edge of the woods with his porkpie hat pulled low over his brow. The cane at the end of his extended arm looked like a metal rod supporting a statue. The way he held his head with his chin high and his shoulders squared reminded me of a picture I’d seen of him standing next to Theodore Roose-velt III—​both of them with white face paint, blond wigs, and long dresses—​playing “chorus girls” in the Hasty Pudding Club’s 1934 production of Hades! The Ladies!

  My uncle was right—​my grandfather needed our help now, and I was the one he disliked the least. I waved to him and headed in his direction but immediately sensed someone stalking me. My sister’s fiancé called my name. His friends called him the Rollocoaster; his ancestors, I suddenly recalled, had colonized Tasmania. Twenty years my sister’s senior, he wheeled across the field on his springy legs. His pale, sparrow-thin thighs and little kangaroo paunch of a belly, the incredibly erect posture flying the banner of his bright smile as he rushed to catch up with his projection of himself. I hoped he might sail right past me. Instead he took me in his arms, kissed my cheek, and in his unidentifiable accent asked how was I keeping and where were my digs these days?

  He seemed pretty relaxed for someone about to perpetrate a fake wedding. Did Rollo know that I knew that the legal wedding had already occurred? I could picture his laser-shorn, hairless body gliding through the soft air above Maui’s white sand beach. Even if I someday had money, I would never be happy enough to justify the expense of going there.

  “I love that this place belongs to you now—​the whole thing!” he said, beaming. “What are you going to do with it?” He gave my shoulder a solid squeeze. I’d never experienced the bonding between men who owned land. I stretched out my neck and surveyed the field. The house only came with four acres, but Rollo didn’t know that. Or maybe he did.

  “I think I’ll live here—​take up residence with Melissa,” I said. I hadn’t told Melissa that there was no electricity, no plumbing, no bathroom, but I could picture us drinking coffee by the kitchen window next to the stove as freezing rain sheeted over the glass. We’d pick apples from the orchard and bake pies and cobbler. Melissa would wear Irish sweaters and let her hair grow out.

  “Your sister’s talking about some kind of partnership with the house here. I like the sound of that. I think you and I have a lot in common. That’s what your sister says. What do you think?”

  I’d always wanted to have things in common with people, so I nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure she wants to tear down that shack,” he said, giving a quick nod toward the place my ancestors had built with nothing but an ax and their own hands, “or”—​he air-quoted his pretend-bride-to-be—“‘burn it to the ground. Build something that isn’t held together with mouse shit.’ ” He closed one eye and, aiming his arms so that I could take a look too, framed the old farmhouse with his hands. “Something three stories? With cantilevered glass? Maybe steel on the north side. Something, you know, that takes advantage of the incredible light here. I’ll text you what I have in mind.”

  The Rollocoaster peeled away. The ceremony was about to start. As I headed for the spot where I had last seen my grandfather, I felt a huge hole open up in my chest, and some unknown essential parts of myself spilled into the grass.

  I couldn’t partner with my sister, that carpetbagger. My grandfather wasn’t even dead yet, and she was planning to torch the place. Even if I convinced her to save the house, she’d want to build a conference center next door, or a helipad, or there’d be product shoots for Martha Kostyra every other weekend. Rollo would be my master.

  I smelled champagne in the sea air. I hadn’t had a drink—​or swallowed any unprescribed pills—​in five years, but I also hadn’t been to an AA meeting in over half that time. I rarely, if ever, thought about drinking or pills, even when Melissa and I occasionally went to bars socially, which we sometimes did, with her friends to hear music.

  Where was Melissa? Melissa, who resisted self-indulgence, who believed in kindness for people who deserved it and in justice for those who did not. When one of the men Melissa worked with at the shelter in downtown Tucson killed himself, she came home crying—​the first time I’d ever seen her cry. After I cooked her supper and ran her a bath, I sat next to the tub while she soaked and eventually asked if she felt better. She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter how I feel,” she said.

  As I passed by a table, my hand scooped up a flute of champagne and emptied the glass into the back of my throat. Before I realized what I’d done, I started to sway drunkenly, even though I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t even pleasantly dizzy. Five years of sobriety down the drain. I half expected my head to explode or the grass under my feet to spontaneously combust. But the sky looked the same as it had a few minutes before. I picked up anothe
r flute. A fuse had been lit. Either I’d go looking for Oxy when we got back to Tucson or I wouldn’t.

  Sipping, I took stock of the house, the glazing peeling off the window mullions. Feeling sick to my stomach, I poured out the half-empty flute. With the sound of the minister’s voice following me, I circled behind the house to look for my grandfather. Along the forest floor, a new generation of trees had grown knee-high where light filtered through the canopy. The dew clinging to the branches stained my pants as I ran my palm over the soft feathers of the needles. I remembered having walked this way many times, at every stage of my life. The tickling thrum that ran from my hand up my arm and along my back, the rich smell of pine sap and musty loam and salt air—​other than the height of the trees, everything here had remained the same. I paused at the overgrown cellar hole, where one of my great-grandfathers had had his scalp removed by an Abenaki, and where his two teenage sons, returning from fishing to find their father, mother, and younger brother lying dead, shot two of the Abenakis, hacked another to death, and chased off the one survivor. They turned in the three Abenaki scalps to the Massachusetts government and put the money toward materials to build a schooner.

  I reached the far side of the house and spotted the caretaker’s truck next to the grave my grandfather had paid someone to dig. As promised, my grandfather lay in the bottom with his arms crossed over his chest. Sitting on his stomach looking up at me, Julia licked her gray muzzle and eyeballed my empty hands. My grandfather’s nostrils flared and his eyes shot open—​pulsing blue crystals in bloodshot yokes.