Good Kids: A Novel by Benjamin Nugent Read Free Book Online Page B

knocked on the door.
    “I’ve come to have a little talk with you,” he said. “Nancy, Khadijah, your behavior, my behavior.”
    He sat in my rolling desk chair. I put down my aunt’s guitar and sat on the floor with my legs tucked close to my chest, tapping an imaginary drumbeat against my knees in order to be musicianly. I waited. He opened his mouth several times and closed it again, like a goldfish.
    “Do you know any songs?” he asked. “I can hear you a little from downstairs. It sounds like you’re playing a lot.”
    I looked at the guitar. The truth was I was having a hard time with chords. I was also having a hard time with playing anything and singing at the same time. The one song I could pull off, sort of—it was actually easier than “Psycho Killer”—was “Heartbreak Hotel.” You could play “Heartbreak Hotel” as a bass line on the low E. And you barely had to sing and play at the same time. The singing was the call, the bass line the response.
    “Sure,” I said. I picked up the guitar. I couldn’t sing very well. But the vocal was basically talking: “Since my baby left me (guitar: BUM BUM) / I found a new place to dwell (BUM BUM).”
    My father spread his legs and clasped his hands in the space between them as I played and sang. He reached out and put his left hand on my right hand, which was still holding a tortoiseshell pick, hovering by the strings. Did he hear Nancy’s voice when he heard music, like I heard Khadijah’s?
    “Not bad, Son,” he said. He held my hand, for three seconds, or four, and then he stood and left.

7.
You’ve Got to Stay Inside the Napkin
    A t seven the next morning, my father was perched on the edge of my bed, shaking me awake.
    “How about you take the day off from school and come on a little trip to the dacha with me?” he proposed. “I tacked up a sign on a bulletin board downtown, and these people called. People who talk like gentle rednecks. We’re going to move our shit out so some nice rednecks with a truck can move their shit in. I’ve never met these people, but they say they’ll help us get our furniture in some mammoth pickup they’ve got and help us load it into storage. Would you care to participate?”
    In the agreement he and my mother had composed in the study, he explained, it was written that my mother would keep the house and he would keep our cabin in the Berkshires, the dacha to which he referred. His plan was to rent it to the rednecks for a year and ease our new state of scarcity. It was not clear to me how he was going to fund both new residences: the New York apartment and the Wattsbury apartment, in which Rachel and I would see him on weekends.
    I was tired of my room by that time, and it was almost spring. I said yes. Leaving what was now my mother’s house at 7:30 in his green Subaru, we went west toward the hills.
    “What have you been doing with yourself besides playing guitar,Joshy?” he asked as he drove. “These past four days have been no good fun for anyone, I know.”
    “I’m also listening to music.” I was glad to have an unimpeachably cool response.
    He stroked his beard for a while. “You want an electric?”
    “Yes.”
    “You need an amp?”
    “Yes. And two effect pedals, and three patch cords.”
    “How much you think that’s going to set back your old man?”
    I had walked to WATTSbury Music the previous afternoon, to ogle, and while there had calculated the answer to this very question. “Six hundred fifty bucks.”
    He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Money is weird right now.”
    I was silent. I knew I was owed.
    “Cost be damned,” he said. “I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”
    “Thanks, man.” I felt that, because of his fallen state and his congeniality, we were rockers together now, and man was a fit term of endearment. “That’s the shit.”
    His eyes grew moist. “There’s a Richard Thompson show at Smith next week. I was thinking of going myself, but I’ll get you a