Amateurs by Dylan Hicks Page A

estrangement. Sara had noticed her father and Steve, Grace’s son, roll their eyes at each other during Marion’s eulogy. The gesture was true to form but disappointing, even considering the eulogy’s shortcomings, its weirdbraid of sanctimony, local history, and score settling. Marion, typically a no-show at family events, was often spoken of in joking terms, and Sara could never tell to what degree hostility outbalanced affection in this ridicule, or if the hostility was mostly that of the bully or mostly that of the castoff. Sara had only met Marion four times aside from unremembered baby meetings, but she idolized her as the cool Crennel, the one with ties to avant-garde film and Subaru loads of yellowing radical bona fides. For much of the seventies and eighties Marion had been a social worker in Berkeley. Now she and her partner ran a catering business.
    Marion stepped into the room, sat sideways on an easy chair, and lit a cigarette. “Looks like I’ll have my first and last smoke in the same room,” she said. They were in Marion’s former bedroom, Sara was reminded. Marion described how it had been furnished in the fifties and early sixties: the squat bookshelf, the peach vanity, the Japanese tissue-box cover. Then she asked about the Gaitskill book. Few took an interest in Sara’s reading, except sometimes to argue that she was doing it too much or at unsuitable times. “When I read her,” Sara said, “it makes me want to write, to write for people, I mean, because I want to make someone else feel how I feel when I read her.” Marion smiled—not condescendingly—and said she’d felt the same way when she discovered Doris Lessing. It didn’t seem that Marion was saying she’d felt the same way because youthful feelings pass like batons from one generation to the next, but rather that they, Marion and Sara, were really alike, akin in spirit as much as in blood. Marion had even written a novel, she said, or most of one, but had never shown it to anyone, not even to Corinne. “Wow,” Sara said. “But,” Marion advised, “you shouldn’t be so clandestine.” A few days later, with a receptive, sophisticated reader in mind, Sara started working harder than ever on her writing. For her that meant slowly and sedulously, and by the time she had two presentable pieces, Marion was sick. Sending her the stories no longer seemed appropriate, orrather the stories no longer seemed appropriate, too trivial for a dying woman’s time.
    Now she heard John entering through the mudroom. They met in the kitchen. His beard was fuller than before and ended in a curling point.
    â€œWhoa!” he said.
    â€œSorry to ambush you—I’m not ambushing you. My dad asked me to pop in.”
    â€œHe did? He was just here, not two months ago.”
    â€œHe worries, is all,” she said.
    â€œThis about that fall? Like I said, it wasn’t bad. Missed his hip altogether. I just reckoned you should know—Hey, George.”
    Her grandfather was coming down the long hallway in a different cardigan, past Chick’s old bedroom and its blanched baseball pennants, past the so-called front door on the side of the house, past the second bathroom and el cuartito, finally to the kitchen. “Sare Bear take you unawares?” he said.
    â€œThe more the merrier,” John said.
    George glanced toward the fridge and touched his stomach. “Tengo hambre, Juan.”
    For dinner John served rosemary chicken, brown rice, and a quinoa salad brightened by cubed cucumbers and gibbous watermelon.
    â€œNo bread?” George said.
    â€œThere’s rice, Grandpa.”
    â€œIs rice bread now?”
    â€œAnd quinoa,” Sara said. “If anything, there’s an excess of grains.”
    Unfazed, John got up to close the sliding glass doors that looked out on the patio and garden. On his way back to the table, he touched