Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett Read Free Book Online

turn out the light.
    Once he’d gotten his license he had taken control of the car and begun to drive her to work. Heading down the state route you always knew exactly where Alden stopped and Finden began because the strip ended. After the muffler shop and the liquor store strategically placed on the town line to serve the residents of the dry community next door, you came to a traffic light. Beyond that it was as if time had stood still. Just the fluted gray railing running up the side of the highway andbehind it, on either side, woods. It continued like that all the way east, seven miles or more toward Boston, until you reached the next town, where another liquor store stood just over the line and the malls and burger chains and car dealerships started up again.
    All his mother’s work was in Finden. Over the years, she cleaned for different families in the mornings but as long as he could remember, she’d always worked afternoons at the Gammonds’, where he would come to pick her up in the afternoons. They lived at the end of a white gravel drive in a large brick house with green shutters and flowers in the window boxes.
    In spring and fall, Mrs. Gammond would often be working in the garden. She had white hair and fine mottled skin and Doug had always remembered her necklace of jade with its large stones of sea green and imperial purple, separated by rings of silver, resting across her chest like the jewels of some northern queen.
    She would ask him how school was going and which subjects interested him and comment on the weather as they waited for his mother to emerge from the house.
    “Such a handsome son you have,” he could remember her saying.
    People had always liked him for his looks. As a child, he’d got lost in the supermarket and all the other mothers had crowded around, saying how adorable he was. As a teenager, he’d begun jacking off naked in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door, goading himself on, his looks beginning to handle like his first real weapon, his first experience of control.
    “She says I’m the best cleaning lady she’s ever employed,” his mother said once on the ride back to Alden, a wry smile on her face, as she smoked her first cigarette in hours, asking Doug to conspire with her for just a little while, to take her slender joke, to be with her for afew moments, on her side. “Maybe one day she’ll give me a medal. A shiny medal.”
    The only man who ever visited their apartment was Father Griffin, in his horn-rimmed glasses and black raincoat. His narrow bird face was gaunt with sympathy. Knowing how to time his calls, he would arrive just before supper, when Doug’s mother had drunk only a glass or two and was still sociable. He’d share parish news—of the sick and the dead and the newly born—and stand up to leave as soon as Doug took supper out of the microwave.
    What the navy recruiter had to offer was a way out of that apartment and the sight of his mother drowning. Doug had signed the papers the day after his eighteenth birthday. For a week he tried coming up with the words to tell his mother he was leaving but they never came and so he decided he’d call her instead, once he reached the base. He took a bus to the Naval Station Great Lakes, and after three days there ended up phoning his cousin Michael instead to let the family know where he’d gone.
    Most of the other recruits struck him as innocents without a plan: patriotic boys itching to stick it to the Evil Empire, kids with eyes set wide apart who looked as if they’d arrived through some damp, half-witted dream into a bunk and a bench in the galley, washed off the prairie like shallow soil. Right away he knew he’d do the minimum and get out. He kept figuring he would write his mother a letter or a postcard, but then again she knew where he was and she hadn’t written or called.
    He met sailors who no longer knew where their folks lived and didn’t seem much to care. At first, he thought