Amateurs by Dylan Hicks

grandfather, as well as the second time in five years that she had visited him. She had promised to join what remained of the family for Thanksgiving ’09 but had bailed at the last minute, citing a freelance deadline, the imminence of which was significantly exaggerated. She thought the excuse would seem more plausible if she told her dad that she had procrastinated on the assignment, that she had already asked for two extensions, that the editor was on the cusp of dismissing her as a deadbeat. (Why, she later asked herself, were her lies so self-incriminating?) She wasn’t racked with guilt over her grandfilial neglect, but it needled her now as she snooped around George’s abandoned office and sporting den, its walls decorated with dusty-nosed African hunting trophies, its closet equipped with superannuated tennis gear, a teal vaporizer, an armory of redundant windbreakers. She lay down on the daybed and resumed reading an oppressively acclaimed novel in which so far there were two incorrect subjunctives. Despite the ambient chirping, George was snoring in the bedroom across the hall.
    Chick had requested and funded both visits, the funding unnecessary but accepted without protest. The first trip, around Christmas of ’06, sought to determine whether George could go on living independently in the house he and Phyliss had bought sixty years earlier; the second sought to determine whether he could go on living under the suspect care of John Anderson. Chick had recently passed through Lammermuir and had ideas of his own, but he was looking for a second opinion, or he wanted to poke the embers of Sara’s loyalty. “You won’t want to see him next in his coffin,” he had said over the phone, though as a rule the Crennels were cremated.
    Loath as she was to admit it, Sara’s inspection so far told of John’s professionalism. The house was clean and in many spots obsessively ordered; the kitchen was stocked with healthful food; a promisingmenu was taped to the fridge. George was grouchier than in his younger days and no longer consistently rapier, but for a man born before the establishment of the League of Nations, he was in good health. He didn’t seem hobbled by his recent fall. Still, Sara resented John’s weaselly presence here. He had horned in on the caretaker-factotum search back in ’07; then, like Dick Cheney, he’d nominated himself to Chick (busy and suggestible) as the fittest candidate. He was the main reason she had reneged on that Thanksgiving.
    Chick didn’t think John should still hold an outside job, selling navy blazers and orange polo shirts part-time at some mall, but Sara was glad now to have a few quiet hours before she had to face him. She blew her nose, dropped the tissue on the floor. The last time she’d lain on this daybed was the night after her grandmother’s funeral, only a few weeks after Sara’s sixteenth birthday. The dominant notes during dinner had seemed to Sara deficiently reflective, everyone talking and asking about the usual things: hockey and Newt Gingrich and O. J. and what classes one was taking, what plans one had for college. Over dessert, the oldest extant cousin casually applied a slur to Carol Moseley Braun and wasn’t properly rebuked. Sara retreated to George’s den shortly thereafter. Fifteen minutes later, Aunt Marion was leaning against the doorjamb. “Mind if we hide out together?” she asked.
    â€œYeah—I mean, no.” She closed her book. She’d brought two on the trip: Foucault for Beginners, one of several illustrated précis from a series she’d been collecting for about a year; and the Mary Gaitskill book she was about to finish.
    â€œDon’t mind Grace,” Marion said. “She’s a pig, but it’s too late.”
    â€œShe’s nice, usually.” The Crennels weren’t without their divisions, which sometimes led to all-out enmity and