Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen

ME! Do you understand? I want you to leave the house this minute.”
    “All right, all right.” Louis walked into the front hall. “Just drop us a postcard from Monaco, OK?”
    Melanie pursued him. The volume of the television had tactfully been increased. “Take that back!”
    “All right. Don’t drop us a postcard from Monaco.”
    “You really don’t understand how inconsiderate you’re being. Do you?”
    When Louis got mad, as opposed to merely feeling righteous, he stuck his chest out and raised his chin and looked down his nose like a sailor or an ugly asking for a fight. He was completely unaware of doing this; the look on his face was dead serious. And as he faced his mother, who after all wasn’t likely to shove him or take a free swing, he looked so incongruously belligerent that her expression softened. “Are you going to punch me, Louis?”
    He lowered his chin, angrier still to see he was only amusing her.
    “Give me a hug,” his mother said. She laid a hand on his arm and held it firmly when he tried to pull away. She said, “I’m not selfish. Do you understand?”
    “Sure.” His hand was on the doorknob. “You’re just upset.”
    “That’s right. And it will be some time before I even see the money.”
    “Sure.”
    “And when I do, I don’t know how much it’s going to be. The figure you mentioned, which you must have gotten from your father—could change a great deal. It’s a very complicated and unfortunate situation. A very—very unfortunate situation.”
    “Sure.”
    “But no matter what, we’ll all be able to do some nice things.”
    “Sure.”
    Her irritation flared. “Stop saying that!”
    A bowling ball struck pins. A crowd cheered. “Sure,” Louis said.
    She dropped his arm. Without looking at her he walked out the door and closed it quietly behind him. Continuing to stare straight ahead, he marched past his car and down the drive, stiff-legged, letting gravity do the work, depressed the way he’d been when he read about the earthquake eight days earlier, depression an isotope of anger: slower and less fierce in its decay, but chemically identical. When his father came into view, at a bend near the bottom of the drive, he hardly noticed him.
    “Howdy, Lou.” Bob’s head was aglow in a nest of Gore-Tex and plaid lining. He smelled like burnt marijuana.
    “Hello,” Louis said, not breaking stride. Bob smiled as he watched him go and immediately forgot that he’d seen him.
    East of the Kernaghan house the land became even more parklike, the yards giving way to estates with hurdles in the pastures and horse trailers in the driveways. A sleek Japanese-made ski boot whooshed past Louis. Pasted to a window was the face of a young girl in a pink church dress. The boot braked and turned and faded a little in the white air as it drove up a hill. The girl jumped from the sliding door running, carrying something in her hand, a book maybe, a Bible.
    Between the ages of six and fifteen, Louis himself had returned from church on approximately 350 Sunday mornings. He’d emerged from the back seat with a light head and the sense of a morning’s worth of playtime lost, wasted in basement church-school rooms which had the accidental furniture arrangement and dank smell of places frequented only by transients. In the early years, of course, there were efforts made to cover up the swindle. There were jars of paste and rusty scissors, mimeographed leaves from a coloring book, and brown crayons with which to color the donkey on which Jesus sat. (These crayons were among the first contributors to his sense of the vastness of the past and the strangeness of history, their unfamiliar design and soiled and dried-out wrappers suggesting that this business of coloring donkeys had been going on significantly longer than his life had, longer than anything at real school, where supplies were always new.) There was music—in particular one song about how Jesus loved the little children of the