Family Linen by Lee Smith

he’d like me better if I was an orphan. But it’s too late. I can’t be an orphan, I’m his son. And I can’t be his best friend, either. The thing is, you don’t want your old man to be so good at everything and be your buddy too. He says he wants to be my best friend because his own father was not around to be with him. This pisses me off and makes me crazy. I mean the nicer he is, the more of an asshole I am. The whole thing pisses me off.
    They were still down there arguing when I went to bed. I thought about going down there and saying, “Gee, Mom and Dad! Sounds to me like you’re really angry with Aunt Sybill!”
    That cracked me up.
    I looked at
Playboy
for a while, all those foxes, and then I got up and got this stupid stuffed dog I got for my birthday one time when I was about seven or eight, don’t ask me why it’s still around. I got this old dog and listened to “Thriller” and thought about Mom and Aunt Sybill yelling. The thing is, and it says this in the stupid P.E.T. book too and it’s really true, I hate to admit it but it’s true, you’re
not
really angry much, if you get right down to it.
    And I could tell from their voices they were scared.

Lacy was never prepared for the pain that kept coming over her: pain so bitter it was sweet almost, like a sore tooth which you have to keep touching with your tongue. She had felt it in the hospital as she looked at her mother, still elegant, still small. And it seemed so ironic
—because I am her daughter, in a sense, more than the others: more than Sybill, than Myrtle, certainly more than Candy. I am more her daughter in a way she could never understand, since I look, I suppose, so different; and since with her, appearances are everything. But the poetry
took,
with me. And how very strange, since she could never tell good from bad, poor thing, or see beyond the iron pink palace of niceness and illusion, of should and sweet, which she had constructed around all of us. She never knew any of us, really. I wonder if she ever knew Daddy, or anybody. Anybody at all. I wonder now if anyone ever does—and if we do, if it’s worth it, all the trouble and pain, when it doesn’t last
—
    The pain came again as Lacy unlocked her car, got in, and put her hand down on the lever to adjust the seat before she remembered it wasn’t necessary. Nobody else drove this car now. The seat, already perfectly adjusted, felt burning hot on the backs of her bare thighs and somehow this pleased her, to find a real location for her pain. She switched on the ignition, then the air conditioner, waiting for Myrtle to come out and give her directions to the new grocery store. Miss Elizabeth’s condition remained unchanged, so it looked as though Lacy and her daughter Kate would be staying longer than they had thought. Lacy felt a need for supplies, a need to draw her wagons into a circle and prepare for siege. But even after two days of it, two days of being here, nothing had really sunk in yet—not her mother’s illness, not even the fact that she was here: that she had, dutiful daughter indeed, come “home.”
    For years Lacy had tried to put distance—real, emotional, and psychological—between herself and Booker Creek. Somehow this changed when Jack left her. It was no longer possible. She really thought she had struggled free of her childhood, of that shell that never quite fit, only to find, when Jack left, that she was caught fast in another sort of shell altogether. It was Jack’s shell; Jack had made it and made her, fashioned her, too, in a way, but now Jack was gone.
It’s worse to be abandoned if you were first rescued. Then you have nothing left except a void. Empty space
. Lacy felt raw, exposed, vulnerable. She could not seem to get her bearings.
    She knew she’d get lost trying to find this new Piggly Wiggly, for instance. She knew she’d get lost even