Ordinary People Read Free

on?”
    Nothing. Nothing I can see. Only I don’t pass up any chances to discharge these fatherly duties, this is the age of perfection, kid. Everybody try their emotional and mental and physical damndest.
    Strive, strive. Correct all defects. All those Saturday trips to the orthodontist, when they were in junior high. Both of his boys had inherited from him, that long, slightly hooked nose; from their mother, the small, determined lower jaw. On them it had required thirty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of work, courtesy Peter Bachmann, D.D.S., M.S. “Hell, what’s a little money?” he had raved. “Overhaul their whole damn jaws if necessary, this is the age of the perfect mouth!” But, secretly, he had been proud that he was able to afford such expenses. He was supporting his family, his boys, in style: whatever they needed, whatever they wanted, they got. He had arrived. He was here. Not bad for the kid from the Evangelical Home.
    And now? Where is he now?
     
     
     
    Beth sets breakfast in front of Cal: eggs, bacon, toast, milk, juice.
    Conrad looks up. “Morning.”
    “Morning. You need a ride today?”
    “No. Lazenby’s picking me up at twenty after.”
    He treats this as a piece of good news. “Great!” Said too heartily, he sees at once. Conrad looks away, frowning.
    “I’ve got to get dressed,” Beth says. “I tee off at nine.” She hands him his coffee; crosses to the doorway; motes of dust flutter nervously in her wake. Conrad is studying. The book is propped against the butter dish.
    “What is it, a quiz?”
    “Book report.”
    “What book?”
    He raises the cover. Cal reads, Jude the Obscure.
    “How is it?”
    “Obscure.”
    He sips his coffee. “No bacon and eggs this morning?”
    He shakes his head. “I only wanted cereal.”
    He has lost twenty-five pounds in one year. Another year before his weight will return to normal, Dr. Crawford predicted.
    “You feel okay?”
    “Yeah, fine. I just didn’t want a big breakfast.”
    The bony angles need to be fleshed out.
    “You ought to keep trying to put weight on,” Cal says.
    “I am. I will. You don’t have to be heavy to swim, Dad.”
    Back to the book, and Cal studies the crisp, dry rectangles on the tile floor. Patterns of sunlight. Familiar and orderly. “How’s it going?” he asks.
    Conrad looks up. “What?”
    “How’s it going? School. Swimming. Everything okay?”
    “Yeah, fine. Same as yesterday.”
    “What does that mean?”
    A faint smile. “It means you ask me that every day.”
    “Sorry.” He smiles, too. “I like things neat.”
    Conrad laughs. He reaches out to flip the book closed. “Okay,” he says, “let’s talk.”
    “Can’t help it,” Cal says. “I regard it as a challenge, people reading at the table.”
    “Yeah.”
    “So, how come Lazenby’s picking you up?”
    “He’s a friend of mine.”
    “I know that. I just wondered if it meant you’d be riding with him from now on.”
    “I don’t have a formal commitment yet. I’m gonna have my secretary talk to his, though.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    “We should have the contract drawn up by the end of the week.”
    “Okay.”
    He does a familiar thing, then; shoves his hands into the back pockets of his Levi’s as he rocks backward in the chair. Conrad, after all. A good sign, despite the brutal haircut; the weary look about the eyes. The eyes bother him every day. He still believes in the picture he carries in his wallet of a boy with longish, dark hair and laugh lines about the mouth and eyes; no weary look there. This gaunt, thin figure that sits across from him, hair chopped bluntly at the neck, still grins; still kids, but the eyes are different. He cannot get used to it.
    His old self. That is the image that must be dispelled. Another piece of advice from the all-powerful Dr. Crawford, Keeper of the Gate. “Don’t expect him to be the same person he was before.” But he does expect that. As does everyone. His mother, his grandmother, his