The Raising Read Free Page A

him, like a racehorse, than to drive him to the hospital screaming in pain with a broken leg.
    It had happened once—the broken leg—and Craig’s mother had done the driving, Craig’s father insisting that he should drive behind them, separately, just in case her car broke down, and even in his writhing agony Craig had picked up on the sneer of contempt his mother shot at his father’s back as he trotted away from her car, huge sweat stains spreading out in the armpits of his gray shirt.
    This time, Craig knew, his dad would probably drive a couple of hours east, as quickly as he could, and take a room at a Holiday Inn.
    “That’s a lot of driving, Mr. Clements,” Perry said. “But, okay.”
    F or the bite to eat, they went to the fanciest restaurant in town, Chez Vin. Chez Vin was where the Clements-Rabbitts had dined as a family the year before, overdressed and exhausted after their long drive, the four of them shoulder to shoulder at the hostess’s podium as Craig’s father announced to the toothy redhead that they were meeting a friend.
    “Oh!” she’d said. “You guys are here to meet Dean Fleming!”
    Craig’s mother rolled her eyes behind the hostess’s back and mouthed “you guys” to Scar. She’d been complaining about this phrase since they’d passed through Ohio, where, at every gas station and fast food place, someone addressed them as “you guys.” At a 7-Eleven in Dundee, Michigan, when the ponytailed twenty-something at the cash register chirped, “How are you guys today?” Craig’s mother had finally snapped and said, “Do I look like a guy ?” She’d gestured toward the family she obviously thought looked far more dignified than they were being given credit for, and said, “Are we guys ? What’s this you guys thing?”
    Craig had turned with his Tic Tacs and hurried out the electric doors into the parking lot as quickly as he could, listening to the girl at the register giggle in panic. Hopefully, she thought it was a joke. Hopefully, Craig’s dad would get his mother out of there before she disabused the poor girl of that.
    But, that first night at Chez Vin, standing at the hostess’s podium, Craig had looked away from his mother, away from Scar, and away from the redhead, and had stared hard at the side of his father’s face while registering for the first time that his father’s friend from college, the one they’d come to meet for dinner, this friend from way back, was the dean of the Honors College—the incredibly selective honors college they’d all been so astonished that, “with your low-achiever grades and unambitious test scores,” Craig had been so lucky, so honored , to get into.
    “What?” his father had said to Craig, sensing his stare and turning around with both his hands up, as if to prove that there was nothing up his sleeve.
    T his year, the hostess was an older woman, who nevertheless said, “Hi, you guys,” to which they all three nodded as she directed them to a corner table. Only Perry had bothered to wear a long-sleeve buttoned shirt and dress shoes. They ate all the bread in the basket before the waiter arrived with their mineral water. Craig’s father and Perry talked about weather and the relative merits of certain kinds of mountain bikes as Craig watched the candle at the center of the table surge and recede—now a perfect diamond shape, now a teardrop, now a fluttering fingernail followed by a crescent followed by a dog tooth followed by a burning vertical eyelid.
    “P erry,” Craig’s father said later, in front of the apartment house, pressing both of Perry’s hands in his own as the boy bid them farewell, “I’m so glad Craig’s—”
    “Craig will be fine, Mr. Clements,” Perry said.
    “Son,” Rod Clements said, turning to Craig, “I—”
    “Be careful driving, Dad.”
    They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A few feet away from them a couple kissed with abandon under a dead streetlamp. A sad foursome of ugly guys