Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow [reading e books TXT] 📗

signals of her face's many mobile bits and pieces. She is afire, he
is afire, their bodies are talking to each other in some secret language of
shifting centers of gravity and unconscious pheromones, and his face tilts down
towards her, slowly with all the time in the world. Lowers and lowers, week-old
whiskers actually tickling the tip of her nose, his lips parting now, and her
breath moistens them, beads them with liquid condensed out of her vapor.

His top lip touches her bottom lip. He could leave it at that and be happy, the
touch is so satisfying, and he is contented there for a long moment, then moves
to engage his lower lip, moving, tilting.

His comm rings.

His comm, which he has switched off, rings.

Shit.

"Hello!" he says, he shouts.

"Arthur?" says a voice that is old and hurt and melancholy. His Gran's voice.
His Gran, who can override his ringer, switch on his comm at a distance because
Art is a good grandson who was raised almost entirely by his saintly and frail
(and depressive and melodramatic and obsessive) grandmother, and of course his
comm is set to pass her calls. Not because he is a suck, but because he is loyal
and sensitive and he loves his Gran.

"Gran, hi! Sorry, I was just in the middle of something, sorry." He checks his
comm, which tells him that it's only six in the morning in Toronto, noon in
London, and that the date is April 8, and that today is the day that he should
have known his grandmother would call.

"You forgot," she says, no accusation, just a weary and disappointed sadness. He
has indeed forgotten.

"No, Gran, I didn't forget."

But he did. It is the eighth of April, 2022, which means that it is twenty-one
years to the day since his mother died. And he has forgotten.

"It's all right. You're busy, I understand. Tell me, Art, how are you? When will
you visit Toronto?"

"I'm fine, Gran. I'm sorry I haven't called, I've been sick." Shit. Wrong lie.

"You're sick? What's wrong?"

"It's nothing. I -- I put my back out. Working too hard. Stress. It's nothing,
Gran."

He chances to look up at Linda, who is standing where he left her when he dived
reflexively for his comm, staring disbelievingly at him. Her robe is open to her
navel, and he sees the three curls of pubic hair above the knot in its belt that
curl towards her groin, sees the hourglass made by the edges of her breasts that
are visible in the vee of the robe, sees the edge of one areole, the left one.
He is in a tee shirt and bare feet and boxers, crouching over his trousers,
talking to his Gran, and he locks eyes with Linda and shakes his head
apologetically, then settles down to sit cross-legged, hunched over an erection
he didn't know he had, resolves to look at her while he talks.

"Stress! Always stress. You should take some vacation time. Are you seeing
someone? A chiropractor?"

He's entangled in the lie. "Yes. I have an appointment tomorrow."

"How will you get there? Don't take the subway. Take a taxi. And give me the
doctor's name, I'll look him up."

"I'll take a cab, it'll be fine, he's the only one my travel insurance covers."

"The only one? Art! What kind of insurance do you have? I'll call them, I'll
find you a chiropractor. Betty Melville, she has family in London, they'll know
someone."

God. "It's fine, Gran. How are you?"

A sigh. "How am I? On this day, how am I?"

"How is your health? Are you keeping busy?"

"My health is fine. I keep busy. Father Ferlenghetti came to dinner last night
at the house. I made a nice roast, and I'll have sandwiches today."

"That's good."

"I'm thinking of your mother, you know."

"I know."

"Do you think of her, Art? You were so young when she went, but you remember
her, don't you?"

"I do, Gran." He remembers her, albeit dimly. He was barely nine when she died.

"Of course -- of course you remember your mother. It's a terrible thing for a
mother to live longer than her daughter."

His Gran says this every year. Art still hasn't figured out how to respond to
it. Time for another stab at it. "I'm glad you're still here, Gran."

Wrong thing. Gran is sobbing now. Art drops his eyes from Linda's and looks at
the crazy weft and woof of the faded old Oriental rug. "Oh, Gran," he says. "I'm
sorry."

In truth, Art has mourned and buried his mother. He was raised just fine by his
Gran, and when he remembers his mother, he is more sad about not being sad than
sad about her.

"I'm an old lady, you know that. You'll remember me when I go, won't you Art?"

This, too, is a ritual question that Art can't answer well enough no matter how
he practices. "Of course, Gran. But you'll be around for a good while yet!"

"When are you coming back to Toronto?" He'd ducked the question before, but
Gran's a master of circling back and upping the ante. *Now that we've
established my imminent demise...*

"Soon as I can, Gran. Maybe when I finish this contract. September, maybe."

"You'll stay here? I can take the sofa. When do you think you'll arrive? My
friends all want to see you again. You remember Mrs. Tomkins? You used to play
with her daughter Alice. Alice is single, you know. She has a good job, too --
working at an insurance company. Maybe she can get you a better health plan."

"I don't know, Gran. I'll *try* to come back after I finish my contract, but I
can't tell what'll be happening then. I'll let you know, OK?"

"Oh, Art. Please come back soon -- I miss you. I'm going to visit your mother's
grave today and put some flowers on it. They keep it very nice at Mount
Pleasant, and the trees are just blooming now."

"I'll come back as soon as I can, Gran. I love you."

"I love you too, Arthur."

"Bye, Gran."

"I'll call you once I speak to Betty about the chiropractor, all right?"

"All right, Gran." He is going to have to go to the chiropractor now, even
though his back feels as good as it has in years. His Gran will be checking up
on it.

"Bye, Arthur. I love you."

"Bye, Gran."

"Bye."

He shakes his head and holsters the comm back in his pants, then rocks back and
lies down on the rug, facing the ceiling, eyes closed. A moment later, the hem
of Linda's robe brushes his arm and she lies down next to him, takes his hand.

"Everything OK?"

"It's just my Gran." And he tells her about this date's significance.

"How did she die?"

"It was stupid. She slipped in the tub and cracked her skull on the tap. I was
off at a friend's place for the weekend and no one found her for two days. She
lived for a week on life support, and they pulled the plug. No brain activity.
They wouldn't let me into the hospital room after the first day. My Gran
practically moved in, though. She raised me after that. I think that if she
hadn't had to take care of me, she would have just given up, you know? She's
pretty lonely back home alone."

"What about your dad?"

"You know, there used to be a big mystery about that. Gran and Mom, they were
always tragic and secretive when I asked them about him. I had lots of stories
to explain his absence: ran off with another woman, thrown in jail for running
guns, murdered in a bar fight. I used to be a bit of a celeb at school -- lots
of kids didn't have dads around, but they all knew where their fathers were. We
could always kill an afternoon making up his who and where and why. Even the
teachers got into it, getting all apologetic when we had to do a genealogy
project. I found out the truth, finally, when I was nineteen. Just looked it up
online. It never occurred to me that my mom would be that secretive about
something that was so easy to find out, so I never bothered."

"So, what happened to him?"

"Oh, you know. He and mom split when I was a kid. He moved back in with his
folks in a little town in the Thousand Islands, near Ottawa. Four or five years
later, he got a job planting trees for a summer up north, and he drowned
swimming in a lake during a party. By the time I found out about him, his folks
were dead, too."

"Did you tell your friends about him, once you found out?"

"Oh, by then I'd lost touch with most of them. After elementary school, we moved
across town, to a condo my grandmother retired into on the lakeshore, out in the
suburbs. In high school, I didn't really chum around much, so there wasn't
anyone to talk to. I did tell my Gran though, asked her why it was such a big
secret, and she said it wasn't, she said she'd told me years before, but she
hadn't. I think that she and Mom just decided to wait until I was older before
telling me, and then after my mom died, she just forgot that she hadn't told me.
We got into a big fight over that."

"That's a weird story, dude. So, do you think of yourself as an orphan?"

Art rolls over on his side, face inches from hers, and snorts a laugh. "God,
that's so -- *Dickensian*. No one ever asked me that before. I don't think so.
You can't really be an adult and be an orphan -- you're just someone with dead
parents. And I didn't find out about my dad until I was older, so I always
figured that he was alive and well somewhere. What about your folks?"

Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art
is aroused by it, but not crazily so -- somewhere in telling his story, he's
figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they're just getting
through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a
bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and
nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh. She follows his
eyes and smiles at him, then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.

"I told you about my mom, right? Wanted to act -- who doesn't? But she was too
conscious of the cliche to mope about it. She got some little parts -- nothing
fab, then went on to work at a Sony dealership. Ten years later, she bought a
franchise. Dad and second-wife run a retreat in West Hollywood for sexually
dysfunctional couples. No sibs. Happy childhood. Happy adolescence. Largely
unsatisfying adulthood, to date."

"Wow, you sound like you've practiced that."

She tweaks his nose, then drapes her arm across his chest. "Got me. Always
writing my autobiography in my head -- gotta have a snappy opener when I'm
cornered by the stalkerazzi."

He laces his fingers in hers, moves close enough to smell her toothpaste-sweet
breath. "Tell me something unrehearsed about growing up."