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

have killed him.”
    “How can you know that?” I said.
    “How can you not know that?” he said.
    And he was right, was the thing. My little brother, Rusty, with his restricted driver’s license and his smoker’s cough, had it pegged. It would have gone just like that—him screaming “I’ll never” with all the teen angst he could muster, which was plenty. And he would have lost. Our father could be the most stubborn and solipsistic of God’s creatures, even if it left him lonely as a goat. The isolation was a kind of fuel, I think. And though the two of them were in that regard nearly identical, in the end it wouldn’t have been a battle of wills. It had been a question not of wanting but of suffering, and the still-deeper truth of the matter was that it had not been a question at all. And so now, maybe, Rusty was going to smoke himself to death just to spite them.
     
    Dara dropped by. My mother introduced her parents. My grandmother invited her to stay for dinner. My father groaned. My mother turned and gave him a look.
    “What?” she said. “There’s plenty.”
    It wasn’t that he had anything against Dara. To the contrary, he thought she was a very good influence—I’d heard him say so in just those words (not like Rusty’s layabout bum of a big brother, seemed to be the implication). It was the presumption he objected to, his in-laws inviting somebody to dinner in his house!
    Dara, smart girl, went off to find Rusty, who was out on the back deck again.
    “It’s good that Rusty has such a nice little friend,” my grandmother said to me.
    “His little friend is not so little,” my grandfather said. I couldn’t help but laugh. It was true. Dara was seventeen, a looker even though she dressed down. Or maybe that was just when she came over to our house. I tried to imagine what she’d look like primed for a night on the town. The kids, I had been told, made a popular hangout of the Sonic Burger down Hillsborough Road, where they’d all meet up after the school football games.
    Okay, so maybe some things were different from Miami.
    “Does Rusty date that girl?” my grandmother asked.
    “No,” my mother said. “Or—well I don’t know exactly, but don’t bring it up with him, okay?”
    “If Rusty doesn’t date that nice girl,” my grandmother said, turning to me, “then you should ask her on a date.”
    “Grandma, she’s like a kid.”
    “I was engaged to be married at her age,” my grandmother said. “And by the time I was your age I had already given birth to your uncle Steve.” My father shook his head. His brother-in-law’s wife is a crazy goy bitch and we don’t talk to either of them anymore.
    “It was a different world,” my mother said to her mother.
    “A nice Jewish girl comes to a house with two eligible young men and can’t get herself so much as asked on a date.”
    “Daniel doesn’t need to date his brother’s friends,” my mother said, “and Rusty’s life is complicated enough as it is.”
    “Why is his life so complicated, I want to know?” my father interjected. “He goes to school, he has his friend, he smokes those damn cigarettes just to make me crazy. He doesn’t even get all A’s. His life is cake and pie.”
    “He got one B,” my mother said, “and it was in phys ed.”
    “Those damn cigarettes—” my father said. Mom just shook her head.
     
    My father was in high school when his parents moved him from some Long Island suburb of no particular distinction to a sunnier, if equally indistinct, suburb of Miami. He should have been glad to escape the fate of that life, but you know how it is—his friends, the places he knew, a girl probably, all his baseball cards. He lost everything, and swore to himself to hate the new state, city, school, life. But couldn’t. He loved South Florida, almost right off the bat. He met my mother there, started his family, and was even heard to say that it was where he expected to die. But none of that love