Mr. X by Peter Straub Read Free Book Online Page B

lunch, the astonished Phil explained the Machiavellian stratagems by which my mother had sandbagged him. Star ate half of what was on her plate, looked at her watch, and stood up from the table. She had a long drive ahead of her, time to go, thanks so much, goodbye.
    By the time I carried her bag downstairs, she was giving Laura a hug from the depths of her new winter coat. I walked her down the path to the Lincoln, wondering if she thought she could get in and drive away without speaking to me. We came up to the car door, and I said, “Mom.” She wrapped me in her arms.
    “Come with me,” she said. “Throw a few things into a suitcase and tell those nice people you’re going to stay with me while you think things over.”
    “What?” I pulled back and looked at her. She was serious.
    “I have enough room to put you up. You can wait tables at Inside the Outside until we find something better.”
    If she had sandbagged Phil, what she was doing to me felt like a mugging. “What’s going on? Laura’s after me about transferring or dropping out for a semester, you can’t even look at me, both of you act like I turned into some person you don’t even like…. I’m not where I’m supposed to be, I’m too skinny, I’m a liar…. All of a sudden, come to Cleveland …” I raised my arms and shook my head in bafflement. “If you can, explain it to me, how about that?”
    “I want to protect you,” she said.
    I couldn’t help it—I laughed at her. “Middlemount’s a lot safer than a nightclub in the middle of Cleveland.”
    Some thought, an explanation or rebuttal, surged across her face. She visibly thrust it away. “Maybe I never had a chance to go to college. But you know what? Working at Inside the Outside isn’t such a bad deal.”
    I had offended her. Even worse, I had insulted her. “Hey, Mom, I never wanted to go to Middlemount, it just happened.”
    “Then get in the car.”
    “I can’t.” In the face of her huge, silent challenge, I said, “I did have a lot of problems, but I can work them out.”
    “Uh-huh,” she said. “The things you don’t know, they’d fill a football stadium.”
    “Like what?” I said, remembering the refusal I had just seen.
    “You and me, honey, we don’t know anything at all.” The warmth of the new coat enveloped me once more, and when I felt her arms and shoulders tremble as she kissed my cheek, I almost decided to climb into the old Lincoln and drive away. Star patted the back of my head twice, three times, waited a beat, then once more. “Get back inside before you freeze to death.”
    I spent most of the next few days studying.
    The Grants kept up a cheerful patter during the drive to O’Hare, though I could tell that Laura was still unhappy. Phil marveled at my mother’s progress in the year since their last championship. In the past, he had been able to predict her decisions three or four moves ahead. “I knew her game better than she knew mine. I could surprise her, whereas she always had to take chances to surprise me.”
    “Whereas?” Laura said.
    “Yes. The point is, once you get to that stage, the situationnever changes. But this year, Star figured out my strategies before I knew what they were. I thought she was just messing around until she started taking my pieces off the board. The level of her game went way past mine, which means that her ability is out of sight.”
    “Whereas yours is merely above average,” Laura said from the backseat.
    “Why are you picking on me? Ned, she’s picking on me, isn’t she?”
    “Sounds like it,” I said.
    “You in a bad mood, honey?”
    “I’m afraid of losing Ned.”
    Phil looked at her in the rearview mirror. “We can’t get rid of the guy. He’s coming back in a couple of weeks.”
    “I hope he does,” Laura said.
    Phil glanced at me, then back up at the mirror. “After you two got back from downtown, Star seemed sort of antsy, like she was upset. Did she seem upset, Ned, when you