Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

chorus of car horns. The light had changed and I had missed it. I hit the gas too hard and almost plowed into the guy in front of me. But didn’t. I was getting the hang of things all over again.
    At the next light I chanced a look into the glove box and sure enough there was a stray cigarette buried under the registration. Do I know my brother or what? I punched in the car lighter, one eye on the traffic light, killed the AC, and lowered the windows. The smells of cut grass and motor oil poured in, along with a lot more sunlight than I had counted on. You sit behind tinted windows for a while and you forget what the day is. I scanned the horizon. It was luscious country, all rises and slopes and green, with a few half-finished planned communities and strip malls, but still. It was mild, as blight goes—enough to make you worry for the future, but somehow not enough to wreck such a sweet summer day. I gawked at every horse in every pasture. The lighter popped back out and I touched it to the cigarette, thinking maybe this was the way into Rusty’s head. I took a drag, started coughing. My eyes watered. The light changed. The horns started in again.
     
    “Oh my, that smell,” my grandmother said, pulling away from my hug. “What have you been doing—smoking?”
    How do you explain this kind of thing to a grandma?
    “You know, during the war,” my grandfather said, “I was quite the smoker. Of course we didn’t know then what we know now. Modern medicine and so forth.”
    “Don’t tell me,” I said, “tell Rusty. He’s the one who needs to know.”
     
    “It’s so green out here,” my grandmother said. We were cruising. “And the hills are just—”
    “I know,” I said. “Don’t you love it?”
    “Prime real estate,” my grandfather said knowingly. Before retirement he had headed some firm. Their golden years were shaping up just right.
    “So how is everything?” my grandmother asked. “It’s been so long.”
    “It’s been okay,” I said. “But you’re pretty up to date. I mean, you talk to Mom twice a week, and I’m assuming you read my letters.”
    “I read them,” my grandfather said. “She won’t go near a computer. ‘That machine,’ she calls it. Like it’s dirty! But I read her your letters.”
    “Sometimes he reads me your letters,” my grandmother said. “But I won’t go near that machine.”
    Sooner or later they would offer to buy me a suit. For job interviews. They would not ask me about my time away.They were good people, good grandparents, but had their prerogative for sure.
     
    Maybe you think my father didn’t want to pick up his in-laws because he didn’t like them. Oh they had their differences, sure. Jewish mothers, in-laws, all the clichés you can imagine just roiling together, lolling to the surface like matzo balls in soup. But I think it’s that having my mother’s parents around drives home how he doesn’t talk to his own father anymore. I don’t know what they fell out about, but they don’t speak. My other grandpa is eighty-something. When I think of it, I call him. He sounds far away and confused, down in Florida near Dad’s sister and the place we left. Grandpa and Dad didn’t even say good-bye.
     
    Rusty was upstairs, in his room. I let myself in. “They’re here,” I said.
    “Don’t ever come in here without knocking,” he said.
    “Did you ever even ask any of your friends if you could stay with them?” I said. “You didn’t, did you? The Weissbergs have got the room. They’d have taken you. We’ve known them how long?”
    “What would have been the point of asking?” he said. “Dad kept going on about breaking up the family. ‘What with your brother off and gone already,’ he kept saying. If I had asked the Weissbergs it would have been worse. Because they would have said okay and Dad would have wanted to say okay, but he wouldn’t have been able to, or he’d have saidokay and then had to take it back. Either way it’d