Everybody's Son

by Thrity Umrigar

“How could you have . . .” “Oh, but yes, I did.” Though Delores’s voice was weak, Anton heard the iron in it. “That day when he told me that poor woman . . . your . . . mom . . . had asked to be relieved of her legal rights. I knew . . . I knew something wasn’t right. It was too—convenient. Too easy. And yet I didn’t push David too hard. I didn’t dare. He looked—so happy. You made him so happy, Anton.” Delores’s voice cracked. “And he had been so unhappy for so long. After James died. It was like watching a dead man come back to life, with you in the house.”

“And you’re a better man than he is. You’re . . . kinder. Softer. Maybe you get that from her. Your . . . mom. You certainly didn’t learn that warmth from us.”

“Well, you let me in,” Anton said, trying desperately to help. Delores sighed. “We tried. We really tried. And Anton, one thing you’ve got to believe me when I tell you—we never felt that we were doing you the favor. We always knew the truth: that it was you helping us.” “That’s not what Dad said,” Anton said quietly.

What had Juanita Vesper earned in exchange for kicking a drug habit, for twenty-five years of sobriety, for decades of working in a small, hot restaurant kitchen? A free lunch hurriedly eaten in between customers. A small house on the outskirts of town that had been left to her by her blind mother. A car that ran but could stop any day. A solitary, almost reclusive life. No extravagant habits, no eating out, no trips to Europe. Did she even have health care? He had no idea. Carine was right. How did he bear it? How did he bear being the thoughtless, self-absorbed prick that he was? How had he not collapsed, how had his bones not cracked under the unbearable weight of his selfishness?

But even as his mind told him that the whole thing had not been such a big deal, his body gave him a different answer. What he had felt was a primal fear, something coded into his DNA, the fear of a black man pulled over by a cop on a stretch of road in Georgia. A black man. That was exactly who he was in this godforsaken place.

One thing he knew for sure he would tell his mam: the recently surfaced memory of when he’d returned to the housing project to find her. She had earned that story and its meaning—that her son had not forgotten her after two and a half years of living in luxury. That he had been willing to give it up just to move back into the dingy apartment with her. That in his deepest, darkest hour, in the hour of his abandonment, when he believed that she had forsaken

him, he had sought her out.

Pappy had had a big hand-painted sign hanging in his home office that read, “Know Thyself.” Anton had claimed the sign after Pappy had died, and it now resided on the floor in his own apartment. He had always intended to put it up, but as with so many things, he had not gotten around to it. That small procrastination, easy enough to explain away in his busy daily life, now assumed symbolic meaning.

Delores was like Mam in that regard, soft, undemanding, loving.

Anton had always believed that the great fatal flaw in Marxist theory was that it had never accounted for actual human behavior—the yawn, the stretch, the shrug, the looking away. And that was exactly what David had done. He had not battled with complexity, had not tried to figure out a way to remain a presence in Anton’s life after his mother was released from prison. What was unforgivable was not that David had wanted Anton to remain in his life or even his conceit in believing that he knew better than anybody else what was in the boy’s best interest. It was that he’d taken a shortcut and exploited Juanita’s situation. It was the oldest story in the world—the ends justifying the means.

At long last, he was willing to be a son.

He needed a fusing together of all the strands of his life: past and present, black and white, poor and rich. He had lived for so long with pieces of his life missing, and as he drove through downtown Ronan and past the diner where his mother worked, it came to him what he must do, what he had come here to do: take her back with him.

You know, people always want their politicians to be father figures. I won’t be. But what I think I can be is a damn good son. A responsible heir, a sober custodian of what belongs to them. Because it ain’t my state or my dad’s. It’s theirs. And you know who reminded me of that, Mam? You did. It’s knowing that I can learn to be a good son to you that gives me the confidence to think I can do this job.