Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

struggling French-Canadian family in Maine, proud of his engineering degree, talented, but naive about money: he had lost his savings in a series of stock market gambles, leaving my mother with a mortgage she couldn’t carry.
    Carol and E.D. hired my mother as a housekeeper when they moved east, in what might have been E.D.‘s attempt at a living memorial for his friend. Did it matter that E.D. never let her forget he’d done her this favor? That he treated her thenceforth as a household accessory? That he maintained a sort of caste system in which the Dupree family was conspicuously second class? Maybe, maybe not. Generosity of any kind is a rare animal, my mother used to say. So maybe I was imagining (or too sensitive to) the pleasure he seemed to take in the intellectual gap between Jason and myself, his apparent conviction that I was born to be Jason’s foil, a conventionally normal yardstick against which Jason’s specialness could be gauged.
    Fortunately both Jase and I knew this was bullshit.
    Diane and Carol were at the table when I sat down. Carol was sober tonight, remarkably, or at least not so drunk that it showed. She had given up her medical practice a couple of years back and these days tended to stick around the house in order to avoid the risk of DWI charges. She smiled at me perfunctorily. “Tyler,” she said. “Welcome.”
    After a few minutes Jason and his father came downstairs together, exchanging glances and frowning: obviously something was up. Jase nodded distractedly when he took the chair next to mine.
    Like most Lawton family occasions, dinner was cordial but strained. We passed the peas and made small talk. Carol was remote, E.D. was uncharacteristically quiet. Diane and Jason took stabs at conversation, but clearly something had passed between Jason and his father that neither wanted to discuss. Jase seemed so restrained that by dessert I wondered whether he was physically ill—his eyes seldom left his plate, which he had barely touched. When it was time to leave for the sledding party he stood up with obvious reluctance and seemed about to beg off until E. D. Lawton said, “Go ahead, take a night off. It’ll be good for you.” And I wondered: a night off from
what
?
    We drove to the party in Diane’s car, an unassuming little Honda, “a my-first-car kind of car,” as Diane liked to describe it. I sat behind the driver’s seat; Jase rode in the passenger seat next to his sister, his knees crowding the glove compartment, still glum.
    “What’d he do,” Diane asked, “spank you?”
    “Hardly.”
    “You’re acting like it.”
    “Am I? Sorry.”
    The sky, of course, was dark. Our headlights swept past snowy lawns, a wall of leafless trees as we turned north. We’d had a record snowfall three days ago, followed by a cold snap that had embalmed the snow under a skin of ice wherever the plows hadn’t been. A few cars passed us at a cautious speed.
    “So what was it,” Diane asked, “something serious?”
    Jason shrugged.
    “War? Pestilence? Famine?”
    He shrugged again and turned up the collar of his jacket.
     
     
    He wasn’t much better at the party. Then again, it wasn’t much of a party.
    It was a gathering of Jason and Diane’s ex-classmates and acquaintances from Rice, hosted by the family of another Rice alumnus home from some Ivy League college. His parents had tried to arrange a dignified theme event: finger sandwiches, hot cocoa, and sledding on the mild slope behind the house. But for the majority of the guests—somber preppies who had skied at Zermatt or Gstaad long before their braces came off—it was just another excuse for clandestine drinking. Outside, under strings of colored lights, silver flasks circulated freely; in the basement a guy named Brent was selling gram weights of Ecstasy.
    Jason found a chair in a corner and sat scowling at anyone who looked friendly. Diane introduced me to a big-eyed girl named Holly and then deserted me. Holly struck