“BY ABOUT SEVENTEEN,” Harriet despaired, “I couldn’t wait to fly the coop. Emory appealed if only because it was about the farthest school from Bellingham that I could find. My parents lobbied for the University of Washington, so I could commute from home. They were clingy. While I was dying to get up to no good, and do everything for myself. I was frantic for my adult life to begin. Which Liam’s hasn’t.”
“Liam’s never seemed to find adult life especially compelling,” Court granted.
As ever, the couple was holed up in the master bedroom of their split-level in Atlanta, voices held to stage whispers. Liam had a room and bath below, which should have afforded them the run of upstairs, and a modicum of privacy. But no, their son preferred to prowl the upper floor, closer to the refrigerator. The switcheroo had not gone unremarked upon: the parents had become the teenagers, bulwarked in their antisocial lair.
Harriet plumped her pillow and raised the volume of the eleven o’clock news for better cover. The stream of unaccompanied children pouring over the Mexican border from Honduras was unabated. “He has no motivation to leave. How’s a community college dropout going to afford a whole house in leafy, middle-class Morningside, a twenty-minute bus ride from downtown? With a juicer and espresso machine? At least in our day, parents were dark on sex and drugs, with rules against cursing and drinking. They marched into your room and turned the music way down without asking, and then ordered you to take out the trash. We let him do what he wants.”
“We could join some obscure cult,” Court proposed, “and turn into hard-ass killjoys overnight. No Godless whore music by Beyoncé, only revivalist hymns, like ‘Shall We Gather at the River.’ Jocanda’s sauntering downstairs would be against our religion—or sauntering, period. We’d have to defend our pure minds from the rays of the devil, so we could ban the internet! I’d buy you a bonnet. We could disavow motorized transportation and modern medical care. Get a horse and buggy and sell the car.”
“I wish you wouldn’t always address this situation with whimsy.” On another evening, she might have spun the fantasy forward, conjuring the draconian laying down of God’s law on Wildwood Place, the pouring of liquor down the drain. But they’d spent too many nights fabricating fanciful solutions, and they just weren’t that funny anymore.
She couldn’t fathom her own impotence. It was their house. But unlike many of their friends’ children, who’d returned home in their twenties, Liam had never left, which eliminated the juncture at which he might at least have had to ask for his old room back.
Harriet might have blamed indulgent parenting, in which case being saddled with a lifelong adolescent was just deserts for failing to raise a functional human being. But Liam’s younger sister, Alicia, had evolved into a competent striver, living with two other young women in Peoplestown while working as the sous chef at Tap. Despite being the firstborn, typically the more intrepid, Liam had never exhibited an appetite for independence as a child. Whereas Alicia grew furious if, in a hurry, you tied her shoes for her—“I want to do it my-sehwf!” became her ringing prime directive by age three—Liam wouldn’t even fold over his sneakers’ Velcro. He threw screaming fits at four when Harriet insisted he learn to wield utensils; he preferred spoon-feeding. Once when he got separated from Harriet at Six Flags, she’d raced the grounds for half an hour before spotting a lone, immobile figure beside the Great American Scream Machine. It hadn’t occurred to the nine-year-old to take some initiative—to locate the Meeting Place, to approach a security guard, or even to attract adult attention by bursting into tears. To the contrary: head swiveling languidly as if taking in the sights, he didn’t race to embrace Mommy in relief, but acknowledged her approach with a nonchalant wave. He’d always possessed an unshakable faith that, come what may, someone else would take care of him.
Obviously, a boy who felt safe and secure was all to the good. Yet the complacency grew less than heartening. Throughout his school years, he let his bicycle rust, content to be ferried to Kmart for supplies. When he was a teenager, she actually wished that he seemed at least a little embarrassed to be seen with his parents. They’d had to veritably foist a first cell phone on the boy in high school, and he never learned how to text or retrieve voicemail; he didn’t keep it charged or do the updates, so that it rapidly transformed into fallen space junk. When his other classmates enrolled in driver’s ed, Liam preferred a nondescript elective called Civic Responsibility, a selection his mother found bleakly comic in retrospect. He still didn’t have a license. Indeed, so little command of an automobile did he enjoy that in the midst of some theoretical metropolitan emergency, of which, say, his poor parents were early victims, while long lines of cars on I-85 fled a viral plague or hordes of flesh-eating zombies, she pictured him sitting inertly in the passenger’s seat in their driveway and poking at the radio.
He couldn’t cook. He couldn’t sew on a button or work the washing machine. Not that she hadn’t taught him these things, or tried. Is a lesson taught if it doesn’t take? No matter how many times she demonstrated which point on the dial corresponded with a load of whites—for heaven’s sake, it said WHITES—and which button started the cycle, he would amble upstairs the next time and ask to be instructed again. Or he’d select the wrong setting for colors and ruin the load. Ineptitude of this magnitude required a genius. But calling incompetence a gambit didn’t change the fact that it worked.
“I feel a little had, frankly,” she confessed to Court, finishing her mint tea. Meanwhile, on the news idealistic young lawyers were streaking to detention centers on the Texas border, eager to provide unaccompanied Central American minors help with negotiating the immigration system or locating distant relatives in Wichita. “When he was a kid-kid, I was more than glad to bake peach crumbles, buy his spiral notebooks, and get him vaccinated. But just because we’re technically still his parents—well, I feel taken advantage of. He never lends a hand. He never vacuums or unloads the dishwasher or shops.”
“Have you asked him?”
Harriet guffawed.
“I know you find his still living at home a little trying. But have you wondered why you want him out of here? He’s an extra expense, but he doesn’t cost us that much.”
“We’re on the cusp of entering a whole new chapter of our lives. Once we retire, it might be nice to, I don’t know, travel.”
“Nothing stops us from traveling. He’s thirty-one. Leave him alone, and we’re not going to be arrested by social services for neglect.”
“Given his vast incapacities, we probably should be.” She didn’t want to travel.
“Do you not …” Court hazarded in a discomfited whisper, “like him?”
“No, it’s not dislike … All that idleness is oppressive. It lowers the barometric pressure of the whole house. And there’s not that much to like or dislike either way, is there?” She worried this formulation of awful neutrality definitely tilted toward dislike. She’d never wanted to be one of those tiresome embodiments of “maternal ambivalence.”
“So what do you really want to change?” Court was a musing, mischievous man, and the sobriety was refreshing.
“I want to feel able to get him out of here,” she determined. “I’d like a choice in the matter. Then, who knows? I might even be okay with his staying.”
The soft, rasping paw on the door was a triumph of patient coaching—Liam’s lifelong impulse was to barge into his parents’ bed-room unannounced—but he didn’t wait to be invited before popping his head in. His face was broad and bland, like a parking lot. “That raspberry crumb coffee cake is gone. And we’re out of paper towels. I thought you’d want to know.”
“But there were two extra-large rolls—” Harriet began.
“I spilled a soda.”
“I’ve asked you, please don’t use yards and yards of that pricey reinforced double-ply on the floor. There’s that big sponge under the sink.” Liam wasn’t an idiot. Imagining that her son would comply with this request if she issued it twenty-five times after he’d ignored it for twenty-four made Harriet the idiot.
In his usual summer uniform of T-shirt and boxers, his flat feet bare and spreading like melting ice cream on the wooden parquet, Liam continued to stand in the doorway, being. It was his habit. One of the many responsibilities he shirked was keeping up his end of conversation. He seemed to regard the sheer fact of himself as both comment and reply. While never having been talkative, he was possessed of a weighty presence, and this sense of mass was literal only in part. Sure, he got no exercise and was on the heavy side, but becoming outright obese would have required ambition on a scale beyond him. He forever exuded the baffled, slightly dazed, not unpleasantly surprised quality of having just been transported to another universe, and of still being unsure of how things in the seventh dimension were done. Try this, Harriet thought: In the seventh dimension, we use a sponge.
“Well,” Harriet said, after an amount of time in which normal people could have done twenty sit-ups or made a cup of instant coffee. “Good night.”
Liam was socially awkward in a way that he didn’t appear to experience as awkwardness. Liam felt fine. He made other people feel awkward. “Right,” he said at last, floating back down the hall, and failing to close the door behind him.
Harriet heaved from the bed and closed the door. “We’ve got to talk to him.”
Court reminded his wife, “We have talked to him.”
THERE HAD INDEED been much earnest discussion about Liam’s occupational future. Environmental campaigning? Maybe Liam could get experience by volunteering for a lobbying organization at the state legislature. Or the hospitality trade, did that appeal? Because Atlanta’s tourism industry did nothing but expand, and entry-level hotel jobs required minimal qualifications, maybe … But his parents did most of the talking, and they might as well have been speculating about the fate of a television character in a series slated to be canceled. “He’s just not an aspiring kind of guy,” his father had recently reasoned out of their firstborn’s earshot. “You can’t change his nature.”
“He could become the kind of young man who aspires to something, if he wanted to,” Harriet insisted.
“I think that’s called assuming the conclusion,” Court said. “The whole problem is not wanting to want to.”
Liam had been diagnosed in the days before everyone routinely put an H between the AD and D, but Ritalin, then Adderall, had only ensured that he did the bare minimum in class a little faster. Because over half of his schoolmates were on the same prescriptions, in a relativistic sense the medications simply maintained what often seemed a carefully calibrated position in the academic pack: not at the very back, but behind the middle—a location that, naturally, attracted the least attention. For if Liam was guilty of nursing a single objective, it was to be left alone. When as a young mother Harriet had dutifully grubbed onto the floor to play with her son, her participation proved an intrusion. He preferred solitary pursuits, of a maximally purposeless variety—filling a cup with pebbles, emptying it out, and filling it up again. She sometimes wondered, when this proclivity for a veritably Buddhist circularity persisted into adolescence, whether he lived on an elevated metaphysical plane, having an inborn sense that this earthly life is chaff, that seeking is only for its own sake, that all grasping after satisfaction is fated to end only in more fruitless, gnawing desire. His affect into adulthood grew only airier. His smooth, pleasant face could entertain such a lofty, pityingly scornful smile that she worried it might someday earn him a sock in the jaw.
Yet when he did venture from the house, he somehow provoked something else entirely. Harriet couldn’t imagine his being perceived as a catch—his body was soft from inactivity, his features engendering the same behind-the-middle position in the comeliness stakes that his schoolwork had achieved in the educational one—so it must have been that very aura of knowingness, of finding everything faintly amusing though in what way he wasn’t about to say, of having mastered a mystery whose solution had been withheld from the multitudes, that explained why Liam had more than once pulled in a stunning girlfriend who would appear to be out of his league. He had something they wanted, or he seemed to have something they wanted, which being indistinguishable from genuine enlightenment was equally enticing—for what they wanted, what all young women most wanted whether or not they knew so consciously, was not to want. To be spared the ceaseless tyranny of yearning, to escape their own desire to please. To stop giving blow jobs because they didn’t like the taste and to be able to say so. To be replete. For that was what Liam Friel-Garson gave off in spades: repleteness.
Other words for replete were less complimentary: smug, self-satisfied, and static.
In her own youth, Harriet wasn’t precisely driven. A better word was directed. Neither she nor Court could quite claim to be a child of the sixties, which in her teenage years had made her feel cheated, but which she understood by college to have been a narrow miss in her favor. Beyond the few issues of consequence like civil rights and the war, the whole Laugh-In la-di-da had been a commercial contrivance to sell beads and flares. She’d also been spared so much retroactive mortification, like the photos of her older sister Eileen in body paint shooting peace signs. Young people in that era thought they were so original and special, and it never occurred to Eileen and her friends that in that case why did they all look identical? The cohort that came of age in the late 1970s was more practical, spurning the overobvious attractions of the creative professions for achievable career choices that were solid second bests. So Harriet had majored in arts administration. The trouble with this strategy was that aiming for second best often meant attaining third best—at best. Harriet’s having finally worked her way up to booking talent for the Woodruff Arts Center was a miracle.
Though she’d never blame him outright, her husband’s underactive sense of agency might have borne some genetic responsibility for their son’s full-blown inertia. For privately she regarded Court as a specimen: the type who just out of college takes an acceptable job with acceptable pay, because it’s there, because it will do, and because it seems a respectable placeholder for surveying an array of beckoning better options. As time lolls infinitely up ahead, promotion ensues. The pay improves. Until suddenly our hero is old enough to have looked up his pending Social Security payments online, and he’s still managing the bookstore in Ansley Mall. Lo, though he has a degree in journalism from Georgia State, apparently he “decided” to be a bookstore manager when he grew up. This process of expedience sliding to what, for mortals, passes for permanence recalled that weary aphorism about life and other plans, and the pattern was far more standard than fixing on a goal and getting there. Court was cheerfully resigned, though his work put only a thin intellectual gloss on removing cuboids from boxes. The Local Bookie was now sponsoring events to counter online sales, and congenial jawing with visiting writers helped compensate for the fact that only five people showed up. Independent bookstores had achieved the same edgy, right-on quality of Eileen’s peace rallies, which made running in the red feel a cut above ordinary bankruptcy.
Court was a boyish, toss-a-baseball-in-the-street type of guy, sexy in his day, still sexy in his way. Maybe it was the cowlick, or an innocuous touch of the prankster that one associates with about age ten, but others always mistook him for younger. Of the two, he was the laissez-faire parent, and while she was reluctant to label him passive, he was too amenable. Were it up to her husband, Court would have granted their son the rather exalted-sounding status that her expatriated college roommate had finally won in Britain: indefinite leave to remain.
But turning fifty-nine in March had hit Harriet with an unexpected starkness. She’d always been a rounder-up in relation to birthdays, and no sooner turned one age than readied herself for the next. Effectively, she was as good as sixty. Much media verbiage serviced the notion that sixty was the new middle age, but Harriet rejected this view on arithmetic grounds; she wouldn’t live to 120.
She accepted that her job had its funky side, but of all the work in the world she wouldn’t have dreamed as a girl of casting about Peachtree Center for a black silk robe for a prima donna hip-hop star’s dressing room. She didn’t mind having ended up in Atlanta, a vigorous, mixed city with terrible traffic that sometimes didn’t even seem part of the South—but she wasn’t confident that she had chosen it rather than come by it, as Court had come by Ansley Mall. Much like her husband’s, the course of her own life exhibited a deficit of intention, and she was running out of time to intend. Granted, in physics “what happens when a stoppable force meets an immovable object?” didn’t pose much of a paradox. She still refused to simply submit to the fact that Liam would be lumped downstairs till the day she died.
BEFORE MAKING A frontal assault, Harriet slipped behind enemy lines to lure a defector.
A force of nature in her latter twenties, buxom and bright in every sense, for going on two years Jocanda had made free with the house on Wildwood Place, to Harriet’s delight. She had a swooshing physical presence and a booming, anarchic laugh. The girl gleaned the funniest cat videos from YouTube and the wisest home remedies from her mother, whose advice to treat discolorations on beech wood with lemon juice had recently rescued Harriet’s blotched butcher-block kitchen island. As for her being African American, Harriet was very proud of her son’s racial open-mindedness, but had never figured out a way of telling him so, since to commend his choice of girlfriend on this basis sounded closed-minded.
Yet the young woman’s CV was disconcerting. She had qualified as a veterinary technician—something short of the full medical whack, the very sort of achievable, solid second-best career choice that Harriet could only applaud. Jocanda was a sophisticate in so many respects. She wore flowing, monochromatic garb made of draping, upscale synthetics, in that orchard of subtle colors in-between the primaries, like tangerine and plum. She preferred Django Unchained to Twelve Years a Slave, and could elucidate with great eloquence why the swashbuckling revenge fantasy was actually more empowering to her community than another sobering epic of abuse. Enthusiasm for Obama didn’t blind her to the dubiety of his extrajudicial drone killings in Pakistan. Still, this intelligent woman conceded cheerfully that she’d never researched the availability of employment in the veterinary field before applying to Gwinnett Tech. Jocanda was part-timing at Staples.
Yet Liam’s girlfriend did have mighty powers. Although she was forever snitching incremental wedges of Harriet’s freshly baked rhubarb cream pie until she consumed two or three slices in the guise of a taste, ferrying away Harriet’s dinner leftovers and never returning the snaplock containers, and availing herself of Harriet’s washing machine, often running a whole load to launder one wraparound and a pair of leggings, Harriet lived in terror of escaping the girl’s good graces, and fell all over herself to be ingratiating. Still officially living with her divorced mother in South DeKalb, Jocanda stayed over only about four nights a week; on the nights she was gone, the feeling upstairs went dumpy and stale, and Harriet would old-lady the evening away mending, watching improving documentaries, and filing clipped recipes. Atmospherically, that girl pumped up the Friel-Garsons’ home to a near-bursting beach ball, and sucked the air out with her when she left.
Alas, the who-curried-whose-favor dynamic put Harriet at a manipulative disadvantage. One evening when earphones safely tethered Liam to his computer in the den, she dangled a timorous question to Jocanda in the living room: “Don’t you and Liam ever wish it was just you two, you know, in your own place?”
“Not really,” Jocanda said, stretching her shapely bare feet onto the coffee table. The single cornrow spiraling from around her crown to below her ears was mesmerizing, and reminded Harriet of The Twilight Zone. “Raised with three brothers, you get used to bumping into folks in the hall. And you and Court make me feel real welcome, don’t you worry about that.”
“But you must sometimes want to be able to have a screaming match, and not worry about being overheard?”
Jocanda tilted her head. “Liam and me don’t have screaming matches. You and Court at odds over something? Sounds like projection to me!” Languidly, Jocanda scratched the family tabby, Fluffernutter, who acted every bit as smitten with Liam’s girlfriend as Harriet was. “As for whatever else you might overhear from upstairs,” she said, eyes aglitter. “It’s kind of a turn-on, if you want to know the truth.”
Having long before owned sex with the same possessive sense of discovery that every generation did, Harriet refused to be embarrassed. “I realize there are only so many openings at veterinary practices, and you have to be patient. But Liam—I mean, he has so many gifts—it does seem as if maybe it’s about time that he, well, did something with his life. And I was thinking—he’s not going to listen to his mother—but I’m sure he’d listen to you.”
Dismissing the cat in a gesture of getting down to serious human business, Jocanda reared back, while eyeing her hostess through the roseate glow of her Negroni—a cocktail whose name made Harriet anxious. “This whole idea of ‘doing something’ with your life, it’s wrong-headed. Ask Liam—you maybe don’t realize, but your son, he’s into some profound shit. You are your life. It’s not outside you. You can’t ‘do something with it’ like a toaster on a table. Liam already is, know what I’m saying? He don’t need to become nothing. This whole goal thing, keeping your head in the future, it’s where most folks get all, like, subdivided. Like, some big part of them’s off in a time and place that don’t even exist and may never exist, ’stead of right here and right now.” Harriet was reluctant to call the downtown touches in Jocanda’s speech an affectation. Still, the girl had been raised in an affluent suburban black neighborhood in Sandy Springs that Harriet and Court could never afford.
“Ah, don’t you think, maybe Liam could still be present in the way that I think you mean and still get a job?”
But Jocanda was on a roll. “Whole country always waiting, and planning, and striving, and educating, trying to ‘get somewhere’ or ‘get ahead’ so they don’t notice where they already at. That’s what don’t wash about the ‘American dream’—that it’s a dream. Like all them wiggly screens in old movies. Liam and me, we awake. Liam and me, we happy as clambakes, right here and right now. We’re not itching to head or get or become, and that’s the whole secret, the whole ball of wax, know what I’m saying?”
“Well, I’m awfully glad to hear you’re so contented with each other!” Harriet declared.
“Contented? Honey, we blast-into-the-stratosphere, off our butts with bliss!” She rattled her ice. “Now, what say we go for a refill? Double up that bliss.” Jocanda’s teeth shone, while Harriet grinned with her mouth closed, self-conscious about how yellowed her smile had grown, here on the threshold of sixty.
IF THE MOUNTAIN’S girlfriend wouldn’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed would go to the mountain—although any proverb with Mohammed in it made Harriet anxious, too.
Hands flat on the kitchen table later the same week, she announced, “We really think it’s time for you to find a job and move out.”
Liam’s head bobbed. “I can see how you might think so. But I’m not trying to hear that.”
“What’s ‘I’m not trying to hear that’ supposed to mean?” Jocanda had a late shift at Staples, and Harriet was feeling forceful.
“Hon, don’t ride him too hard,” Court said. “We’re just exploring possibilities.”
“In allowing you to stay here for the foreseeable future, we’re being lousy parents. It’s child abuse.”
“That’s nice of you to worry,” Liam said politely. “But I’ll be all right. Kids sticking around—it’s a thing.”
“He’s right about that,” Court contributed unhelpfully. “It is a thing.”
“Well, I’m hugely sympathetic with the likes of the Sawyers,” Harriet allowed. “You know their daughter Julia—she got a master’s from Duke, and now she’s back home trying to pay off a quarter of a million bucks in student loan debt. Lucy says they’re having to get her treated for depression. But your loans are a fraction of that, and we’ve almost paid them off.” Harriet was privately convinced that Liam’s brief infatuation with a degree in court reporting hailed directly from his watching too much Law & Order.
“I do wish you’d let that go,” Liam said pleasantly. “It was the stenography. They decided I must be dyslexic.”
“Voice recognition software will eliminate those positions anyway,” Court said. “Liam dodged a bullet, in my view.”
“But don’t you want to have a career, raise a family? Make the world a better place?”
“That whole, you know—it’s not my bag.” Liam continued to sound affable. From childhood, he’d lacked the shame gene. If a parent went nuclear with, “I’m so disappointed in you” regarding his substandard grades—and by the time Liam was in school, to get anything less than a B you really had to go out of your way—he took in the assertion congenially as a point of information. Corporal punishment was out; using food as reward or chastisement was said to foster eating disorders; “grounding” was meaningless when there was nowhere their son especially wanted to go. So Liam’s immunity to their displeasure had reduced disciplinary options to zero.
“Well, what is your bag?” Harriet charged.
“Manhole covers,” Liam said promptly.
Not that this was news. Liam spent hours per day on ManHole.com—an address that initially moved his mother to assure him that they’d have no problem with his being gay. But no, it was a website for enthusiasts of manhole covers. They traded photographs of different designs, scans of pencil rubbings, anecdotes about sewer-gas explosions, and stories of car-axle breakages when metal thieves stealing the big iron discs left the cavity agape. Obsessed with a cramped urban version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, hole spotters with more catholic interests explored a sideline in municipal drains, debating parallel versus perpendicular gutter grates, while one pull-down menu listed big digs, roadworks, and water pipe replacements. The very arbitrariness of the absorption was clearly its attraction: more filling a cup with pebbles and dumping them out again. Harriet would have liked to infer from her son’s fascination with substructure a metaphorical determination to eschew surface for deeper substance, to get to the bottom of things, to master underlying patterns and derive the gist, but she couldn’t help but associate holes in the ground with pet burials and sandboxes.
“I’m not sure we’re going to be able to exploit that. But what if we told you,” Harriet veered, “that we’re thinking of offering your room to a Central American refugee?”
Court looked alarmed. They hadn’t discussed this.
“Why take in one refugee,” Liam said smoothly, “only to create another?”
“You’d hardly be on a par with someone fleeing violence and hardship. You’ve had all the advantages. A nice home, clothes, plenty to eat—”
“So as punishment for these advantages,” Liam said, “I have to give them up. Though I’d at least be fleeing persecution, if this discussion is anything to go by.”
“Buddy boy,” Court said, “we sure don’t mean to twist any screws—”
Liam stood up; they were dismissed. “It seems crazy to pay for a whole other pad when there’s a bedroom downstairs. You always go on about carbon footprints. Well, I use fewer resources this way, too. Unless you don’t like having me here?”
“Of course we do!” Court said. “We love having you here! Don’t we, pumpkin?”
SO MUCH FOR the talking to.
Applying the new political fashion for the “nudge,” phase two involved an unnerving outlay of cash. But Harriet argued that presenting Liam with a fait accompli would introduce him to the thrills of autonomy—to which he would become sufficiently accustomed that the prospect of living with parents in one’s thirties might reachieve the stigma it had apparently lost. So the couple sought out a one-bedroom apartment that listed for $1,250/month in the rapidly revitalizing In-town neighborhood of Old Fourth Ward. They put down the deposit and prepaid two months’ rent.
They presented the plan to Liam with a giddy gaiety that may have bordered on hysteria: The two months’ free ride should give Liam time to find work, so that by the third he could pay the rent himself. They promised him a stipend for the transitional period, and help in locating job openings. MARTA having crabbed in all directions from the center of town, lack of a driver’s license shouldn’t pose a problem, so long as he avoided delivery work. They would admire his determination, Harriet emphasized, even if he started at a rudimentary job like minding a cash register—although historically Liam had proven as indifferent to parental approval as he had to their disappointment. Throughout this presentation, he continued to forge his way through a carton of fudge nut ripple, pausing only to dig out and lick clean the almonds, which he preferred to eat plain.
“It’s a cute place!” Harriet enthused. “With a balcony. You’re not far from the Carter Library, and the trail through Freedom Park. O4W is becoming really hip, you know, and super integrated.”
“You mean I’d be displacing an African American,” Liam said, scraping the last of the ice cream.
Harriet blushed. There was truth to the charge. “Blacks and whites living side by side immeasurably improves the social health of this city.”
That smile again, the one that could get him decked someday, and pretty soon Harriet could be volunteering to do the honors herself. “You should consider becoming a flack for one of those big developers. You’ve got the knack.”
His parents spent the following weekend scouring thrift shops and yard sales for secondhand furniture. Liam went amicably along for the ride, but claimed to have hurt his back doing a manhole cover rubbing on North Rock Springs Road, and let them load the serviceable single bed frame, fold-up table, and upright caned chairs into their VW wagon with the same vicarious engagement with which Norwegian television viewers were said to have watched the stoking of a woodstove on camera for hours on end. The apartment was a one-floor walk-up, and as his aging progenitors struggled to lift a sofa over the banister, Liam provided helpful pointers from below.
Harriet set up the new router that came with the Comcast one-year contract—though the password she picked, Liberty4ME!, did raise the question of liberty for whom exactly—folded clean clothes into his dresser, and packed the refrigerator with a generous Kroger shop that included more fudge nut ripple. She made up the bed with worn sheets from home, though the pillows were new, while Court registered for a free two-week trial subscription to Netflix on Liam’s laptop. She unpackaged a new toothbrush, popping it in one of the Family Guy glasses from the yard sale on Windemere Drive, and stacked the cabinets with the set of floral stoneware—on the ugly side, but with one plate chipped and a dessert plate missing, the as-is dinnerware had been a steal for six bucks.
Struggling to equalize the bedroom blind, Harriet remembered kitting out her own first digs. When you got older and more financially capable of devising domestic space in keeping with your tastes, your very agency gave rise to dissatisfaction—leading couples their age to continually make over kitchens, build new extensions, and tear down walls. Because the real inadequacy was one of imagination, the wealthier you became, the more utterly you erected a monument to your own limitations.
Yet in her youth the simplest making do had been exhilarating. Back then, chance acquisitions worked accidental magic, coming together in a way that never would have fallen into place by design. Odds and ends of crockery had complemented one another with slant juxtaposition, like the parts of a Schoenberg quartet. A fake-Victorian blue-and-white dinner plate would strike chords with a parti-colored polka-dotted soup bowl and hit serendipitous harmonics.
After Harriet graduated from Emory and was outfitting her first apartment in Little Five Points (“Little Five” if you were with it), her parents had driven out from Bellingham to help, making a vacation of the project and stopping to see Eileen in Kansas City en route. Harriet had felt both comforted and crowded. True, the gifts of small furniture and used housewares were a welcome economy, and her father had used a tape measure to hang the Cars and Steely Dan posters at the same height. She’d scrounged through her mother’s boxes of family castoffs for the red-fringed tablecloth she’d grown up with, printed with tiny dustpans, brooms, and 1950s fridges. Yet she’d been desperate to be left to her own devices, and didn’t really want to be taken out to eat in the Old Spaghetti Factory in Underground Atlanta, but ached to prepare her own meals in her own kitchen, whatever and whenever she liked. When her parents finally cleared off, she cranked up Can’t Buy a Thrill to dance in celebration at two a.m., until the resident of the apartment below furiously pounded his ceiling.
For all that glorious self-sufficiency there would be a price to pay, of course, one steeper than the ire of a neighbor who felt excluded from all the fun: nights when the bottom fell out for no reason, and freedom converted to ordinary loneliness, hollow and dragging; on certain Gethsemanes, the loneliness descended to desolation. But you only realized later that it was supposed to be that way—that the very precariousness of young adulthood was what made it so heady—that balancing on the edge of a sheer drop conveyed heroism to mere standing up. To this day, the pop tunes of that era, like “Baker Street,” filled her with a soaring sense of possibility that none of the highbrow symphonies at Woodruff could stir.
Thus in Liam’s place, she’d have been twirling with delight that the teal sofa from Goodwill fit perfectly beneath the bay window—the while chafing for her parents to go. Liam, however, stood in the middle of the main room, equidistant from every object as if to express a perfect lack of attachment to each foreign appointment. As he had when lost at Six Flags at nine, their son didn’t look frightened or unsettled, but he did seem to be waiting, less for his parents to leave, which they
“But what will I do for dinner?” he asked.
“There’s the makings for ham sandwiches, or a burger,” Harriet said. “I left you some chicken, sweet peppers. You could try a stirfry …” She could as well have told him that he could also order Chinese from a takeout place on the moon.
In the end, they stayed and christened his new apartment with a meal she whipped up herself, a useful exercise. He also needed a serving spoon, a vegetable peeler, and a mixing bowl.
ON THE PRETEXT of getting help choosing job openings on Craigslist, Liam returned the next day for lunch. Once back from Ansley Mall, Court helped him go at it until after seven, at which point it was easy enough to put out a third plate for the bolognese. By the following week, Harriet was stricken with Provender Pity. The sliced ham in Liam’s fridge would be acquiring a fetid slick, the chicken would be toxic, the ground beef oxidized. Oh, their son returned to his apartment to sleep, but Court often broke down and gave him a ride. They were paying $1,250/month to outsource a mattress. Thus far having eliminated the perk but not the problem, she missed Jocanda.
The job search was more pebbles and cups, and Harriet grew alarmed when Liam started to enjoy it. Given his appetite for numbing circularity, that meant the process never threatened to end anywhere other than where it began. It seemed the interviewer at the Four Seasons had commented that his applicant “didn’t really seem to want the job” of receptionist at the plush downtown hotel, and their son had then credited the man with being “keenly observant.” What was she supposed to do, come with him?
The third month, they piled Liam’s furniture at the back of the carport, after which the VW wagon would no longer quite fit under its roof. Once the war of independence was battled in reverse, the fact that Liam had lent a hand in packing up the floral stoneware, the worn sheets, the charming print tablecloth from Harriet’s childhood, and his brand-new mixing bowl was purely discouraging. It was at least gracious of the landlord to let them break the lease without penalty. He was sympathetic, he said. His brother in Saint Louis had four grown kids, and in short order after college every single one of them had come back home.
It was winter now, and their firstborn had turned thirty-two.
BY SPRING, HARRIET was crazed. Fundamentally, the predicament was zoological. Like the time a badger had gotten into the toolshed and simply skulked farther back by the rakes the more they shouted at it. A large animal had invaded her territory, and it would not scare out. But you couldn’t put an apple in a cage in the backyard and wait for your son to trip the latch.
Alicia stopped by in May. It pained Harriet that her daughter seemed to pay these biannual visits—too evenly spaced, the way one schedules dental check-ups—in the same spirit of fatalistic obligation in which Harriet had visited her own parents. So she knew the drill. Having shown up on the early side, Alicia would pick at her dinner, though she’d always been a night owl with a creditable appetite; her real evening would commence once she fled. Yet they’d tried to be companionable parents—broad-minded, unrestrictive, and nonjudgmental to such a degree that, in relation to Liam anyway, admonition had built up in Harriet’s system like mercury poisoning. Did nothing ever change? Didn’t anyone like their parents and look forward to seeing them? Or did all grown children shoot surreptitious glances at their father’s watch, gauging whether they’d served enough of their sentence that they might get time off for good behavior?
At twenty-six, Alicia possessed a knowing sourness that Harriet recognized. It was a weak disguise of knowing absolutely nothing and having unrealistically high expectations of everything and everybody. Harriet had imagined herself a cynic at that age as well, until she chanced across snapshots of her own postgraduate years in the 1980s: big-eyed, soft-lipped, the facial expressions perfectly undefended—a beautiful idiot. In oversize black jeans and a boxy, mannish sports jacket, Alicia did her damnedest to disguise how pretty she was. Harriet had lost track of whether her daughter was currently “gender queer” or “gender nonconforming”; having looked up both terms online, she still couldn’t have told you the difference with a gun to her head. When Harriet was growing up, women were trying to immolate gender stereotypes. These days, you preserved the stereotype, the better not to correspond to it. She wasn’t sure what the difference was there, either, but with Alicia she wasn’t looking for a fight.
Mother and daughter had a brief window on their own, since Court had been making an effort to share Liam’s fascination with manhole covers, and the two men had launched into Druid Hills to track down a retro design.
“Any progress on finding Little Liam another tree house?” Alicia asked, sipping rosé on the back patio.
“Your brother doesn’t seem very interested in making his own way in the world,” Harriet said.
“Why should he be? He’s got everything he needs here. I’ve half a mind to move back home myself. Jack, you remember her—she’s back with the folks, saving to buy her own place. She’ll have enough for a down payment, too, by the time she’s fifty-five.”
“I realize that property prices for your generation—”
“Oh, screw it. I don’t want a house. But these parasaito shinguru who waitress at Tap—”
Harriet frowned.
Alicia translated, “‘Parasite singles.’ Common parlance around here now, but the Japanese coined it, so they’ve obviously got the same thing-that-wouldn’t-leave problem in Tokyo. The waitstaff who live with their parents—you have to be super nice to them, because if you so much as say boo they’ll quit in the middle of their shift. No rent to pay—nothing to lose. Their tips and wages are just especially generous forms of an allowance. So they go out all the time, and wear shit-hot gear, and always have the latest iPhone. I still have a five.”
“You have what money can’t buy: self-respect. And that’s why you don’t really want your old room back.”
Alicia chuckled. “I made you nervous. Admit it.”
“It’s our home gym now, as you know very well. I’d have nowhere else to put the StairMaster.”
“You could put it in the utility room.”
“I can’t stand that thing without TV!”
“See? You are. You’re nervous.”
“What am I supposed to do about your brother?” Harriet lamented.
Alicia shrugged. “Kick him out. Get all Darwinian on his ass.”
“We can’t throw our own son on the street. You know, home is where they’ll always take you in and all.”
“I never knew you were such a sucker for poetry.”
“He’s not able to take care of himself, and you know it, sweetie.”
“He was useless in school because he could get away with being useless, and he’s useless here for the same reason. He’s not mentally challenged, he’s fucking smart, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Meanwhile, you’ve disabled his survival instinct. It’s like, unplugged. Or at least rerouted. He can survive here; he’s got that sorted. But force him to survive somewhere else, and my money says he won’t end up in the morgue.”
“Alicia!”
“All I know is it’s not fair. You cover all his expenses, and I cover all of mine. You’re paying off his student loans, and I’m paying off my own loans. He gets meat and two veg every night, and I’m living on pot noodles. Useless pays. He makes me feel like a sucker.”
“But honey, standing on your own two feet—it’s so much more admirable!”
“I don’t need your admiration. I need more money.”
“What I don’t understand is—what does Liam expect to happen, in due course? We’re getting older. Life doesn’t stand still.”
“You and Dad will get feeble and dotty and move into an assisted-living facility and eventually a nursing home. Beforehand, because Liam knows you’re planners, way in advance of Medicaid’s ‘look-back period’ you’ll have steadily transferred any remaining assets, and finally this house, into Liam’s name. Once you’re down to two grand in cash, at least on paper, you’ll qualify for Medicaid—though he tells me that you can still keep one car. This way the government will pick up the tab for your long-term care, so some larcenous geriatric outfit won’t eat up your savings. Voilà. Liam stays in his room. If, over time, the assets dwindle, he can sell the house and downsize.”
Harriet was stunned. “I can’t imagine our Liam figuring all that out.”
“Then you don’t know him very well.”
“I think that’s the sort of thing that as a loyal sister you’re not supposed to be telling me.” Alicia had been a terrible tattletale as a girl.
“Loyal sister was invited in on the deal. He said I could move in, too, once you’re addled. Though I think he just likes the idea of keeping someone on hand who can drive.”
Court and Liam returned, rubbing proudly in tow. While Harriet rustled up tacos, the other three lounged at the kitchen table, with CNN yammering behind them. This summer the Central Americans had been eclipsed by the European refugee crisis. To the left of Alicia’s head, discarded orange life jackets littered a Greek beach. Many of the life jackets, Anderson Cooper explained, were defective.
“If you actually look at who’s in those boats,” Liam said, pointing at another rescue at sea, “tons of them aren’t from Syria. They’re from Africa. Like, it’s kind of obvious, if you get my drift. You don’t exactly have to check their passports.”
“So?” Alicia said.
“So they’re not running away from a war. They just want the good life.” For Liam, this was unusual engagement with the news. Ever since Harriet’s mumble about perhaps replacing him with a waif from Honduras, he’d felt competitive with the wretched refuse of anyone’s teeming shore.
“You of all people,” Alicia said, “are incensed by economic opportunism?”
Even his sister had trouble ruffling her brother’s feathers. “All of Africa and the Middle East can’t move to Germany,” he said mildly. “It’ll get crowded, and the Germans will get sick of them. They should stay home.”
“You’d know about that,” Alicia clipped.
Chopping green peppers, Harriet wondered whether recipients of charity were naturally suspicious of other recipients of charity; for Liam, that had been an impassioned speech. Clearly, he resented the genuinely desperate and dispossessed for making him seem capable and prosperous in comparison.
Weakness was a weapon, and a fiendishly effective one. Harriet increasingly experienced their son’s poor education, domestic ineptitude, off-kilter social skills, and broad unemployability as a form of blackmail. Yet this brand of extortion—I have thrown myself on your mercy; if you don’t take care of me, I will make you look like a monster—depended on physical presence. The moment those poor migrants set one foot on Greek sand they ceased to be an African or Syrian problem and transformed into a European one. The temptation to pole those populous dinghies from the shore must have been stupendous, although with the cameras rolling no one on Lesbos wanted to look that callous—or, to give the good Greek people more credit still, they didn’t want to be that callous. Yet surely you were a bit of a patsy to allow your own finest qualities to be used against you: your sympathy with the vulnerable, as anyone who drew a short stick of any description was now labeled incessantly; your self-consciousness about your own privilege; your sense of responsibility for the defenseless; your decency, your kindness, your generosity. Okay, but if weakness conferred power, Harriet realized joyously, so did being an asshole.
IT HAD TAKEN days of cajoling to get Liam to join an expedition in sewer spelunking sponsored by his buddies on ManHole.com, the better for their son to be out of the house a whole Saturday. Harriet sneak-thiefed downstairs, come to ransack her own home. In big plastic containers allegedly purchased as protection for sweaters, she folded her son’s shirts in neat stacks, filling empty crevices with rolled boxers and bunches of socks. The exercise might have recalled packing Liam’s bags for summer camp, except that Liam had never cared to go to camp. The books were few; he wasn’t a big reader.
Helping lug the containers up to the foyer, Court plunked the first on the floor in befuddlement. “But what are we going to do with this stuff?”
“Once it’s on the other side of that front door,” she said, dragging the box labeled JEANS/SLACKS over the threshold, “the only question is what Liam’s going to do with it.”
Court was queasy about the scheme, which his wife had sold as “a sociological experiment.” The locksmith arrived at noon.
By the time a fellow hole spotter dropped Liam back home at six p.m., the front yard was stacked with their son’s belongings, the containers secured with a tarp in case of thunderstorms. Huddled at the kitchen table clutching glasses of the wine they’d largely forgone for years—if they kept it in the house, Liam drank it all—Harriet and Court heard the key crunch into the side-door lock and then snick-snick when it wouldn’t turn. “Mom?” Typically, the call was indolent, untroubled. Then the same soft mauling that often afflicted their bedroom door, a soughing sound that brought to mind “The Monkey’s Paw.” “Something’s wrong with the lock.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the lock.” Harriet’s voice had gone squeaky. “This motel has no vacancies. No room at the inn. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
He might have inferred the futility of the circuit, but Liam still went through the theater of shuffling to the front door, to the patio sliding door, and to the separate back entrance to his own former warren downstairs, the better to underscore how much bother his own parents had gone to in order to batten down the hatches against their only son. Listening to the old house keys jam each time made Harriet feel trapped, as if she hadn’t locked her boy out but herself inside. In a horror movie, they’d be goners.
“This is awful,” Court mumbled. “I’m not going to be able to hold out.”
“You will hold out, and so will I. This is the hard part. We just have to keep our nerve, and not go soft and gooey.”
“You know what a customer at the Bookie called stay-at-home adults? Failed fledglings. But what happens when you push a little bird from the nest, and it still can’t fly? It’s not a pretty picture.”
“Liam’s not a little bird. We’ve come this far. And I’m scientifically curious what he’s going to do.”
For the time being, what Liam did was return to the side door and stand there. He didn’t keep pawing, and he didn’t beg. But the silhouette of his blunt, impassive form lurked behind the thin curtains, like a paper target at a shooting range. The reproachful shadow would be able to discern them more clearly in the light of the overhead, merrily preparing a meal that their son wasn’t invited to join, toasting the abandonment of their firstborn with a feisty Pinot Gris. At length, Harriet grew so uncomfortable that she corked the bottle and took their plates down the hall, barricading themselves in the bedroom on the queen-size mattress just as they’d hidden out when Liam was still home.
Jocanda had apologized that her mother didn’t exactly welcome a white boyfriend, which was why she and Liam always spent the night together over here. So Harriet had rather assumed that her ousted son would end up bunking with Alicia. It was more unfairness, dumping the girl’s brother in her lap, but Harriet was sure that Alicia’s hard-working roommates would refuse to carry a slacker for more than a few days. Then Darwin would work his magic.
Yet the next morning, their neighbor from across the street, Judy Leavenson, phoned as early as acceptable on a Sunday. “I knew it was getting bad downtown,” she said. “But I’m a little surprised that it’s spread to Morningside. Don’t get me wrong, my heart goes out to the urban poor, but are y’all aware that there’s a homeless person sleeping smack outside your front door?”
Harriet peeked through the den’s venetian blinds. Sure enough, the plastic containers were stacked in a fort formation, inside of which the tarp was laid over the grass. She recognized the disordered swaddling around the motionless lump in the center as the light-blue sheets and thin-weave yellow blanket they’d provided Liam for his truncated stint in O4W, which he’d topped with the cherry-red, housewares-dotted tablecloth, whose vibrancy called attention to his dilemma. That Liam had ventured no farther than the front yard was dispiriting, but locating the box of linens still stashed beneath the carport displayed more resourcefulness than she’d seen him manifest in thirty-two years.
“That’s a homeless person, all right,” Harriet said. “It’s Liam. We decided it was time he found alternative accommodation.”
“Mercy me, Harriet, that’s simply extraordinary!” The proclamation was studiously impartial. “You mean you’ve chucked that boy out?”
“We’ve suggested that our young man take responsibility for himself, yes.”
“My dear,” Court said in her ear. “Sorry to interrupt, but he’s going to get hungry.”
“Isn’t that the point?” Harriet exclaimed, covering the receiver. She was flustered, if only because she’d been thinking the same thing. “Isn’t getting hungry the very essence of your survival instinct kicking in?”
Yet by the time she finished trying to explain to Judy their tough-love philosophy in terms that didn’t make them seem like animals, a second peek through the blinds revealed a plate beside their stirring petitioner, with a freshly toasted bagel and cream cheese, drizzled with strawberry jam—just the way Liam liked it. Court wasn’t cut out for this stuff.
Word of Liam’s plight spread rapidly down the lane, and neighbors cleaved down the middle. To a portion of their peers, the pitiless Friel-Garsons lacked any normal nurturing impulse and had no appreciation for the daunting financial obstacles confronting young people today. To others, they were brave crusaders finally laying down the law to a coddled, work-shy generation that adults were obliged to put aside childish things, and that included their old bedrooms.
Harriet and Court’s supporters were given to high fives and shoulder claps, but Liam’s sympathizers were more proactive. Thus a large purple domed tent with nicely sealed seams, zippered half-moon entrance, and net windows for cross-ventilation was now pitched in their front yard. Other well-wishers obliged with a light sleeping bag and air bed—doubles, the better to allow for conjugal visits. Locally resident backers provided access to convenient bathrooms, so that Liam actually took more showers as a refugee than he had as an overstaying houseguest. Cases of soda and iced coolers of beer appeared, along with a coterie of his fellow spongers, who would linger into the summer evenings as the heat subsided, perching on Liam’s plastic containers while playing catch-and-release with fireflies.
It took little more than a week for the banner to unfurl. Painted in purple letters to match the tent, PARENTHOOD HAS NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS stretched from a dowel driven beside the driveway to the trunk of the far magnolia. Chagrined, and anxious that their son might take advantage of an open door to push back inside, both parents took to coming and going by the back entrance, which meant scuttling through the hollow scold of Liam’s old haunt. They skulked shiftily in and out of the car, like squatters keeping their heads down and uneasy about the arrival of police.
The supplicant on their lawn was unlikely to starve. To the contrary, the Friel-Garsons’ trash cans began to fill up with discarded wax paper from deli sandwiches and Styrofoam containers sticky with barbecue sauce. Liam left emptied Pyrex casserole dishes by the mailbox for retrieval. There he also deposited bags of dirty laundry that vanished and rematerialized fresh and neatly folded, just as his clothes had miraculously rejuvenated themselves his whole life.
In attracting a flock of other failed fledglings, Liam had at last located his social milieu, as well as a sizable enough national constituency—highly motivated by fellow feeling and bald self-interest, eternally online, and chronically underoccupied—to keep their young man in short ribs and sides of coleslaw for some time to come. Harriet had never seen him so chatty and at ease around other people, many of whom appeared to revere him as a celebrity icon, though her son had never before evidenced what she’d call leadership qualities. One of his comrades in the cause—a core quintet had labeled itself proudly “The Freeloading Five”—produced a device for a Wi-Fi hotspot, the better to rally support farther afield. Donations from other bedroom barnacles poured into their website from as far away as Oregon and Maine. And who was the inspirational organizer of this fund-raising, as well as the primary publicist, the logistics mastermind, indeed, the chief strategist of the whole campaign? Jocanda.
Its environs increasingly trashed, like the site of a recently vacated flea market, the split-level on Wildwood Place also became subject to pickets, during which a contingent of millennials shuffled the sidewalk prodding smart phones while shouldering placards: SAFE SPACE IS A HUMAN RIGHT AND PETER PAN RULES! Gawkers from other neighborhoods, along with some motorists with out-of-state plates, began rubbernecking slowly past their address in sufficient numbers that neighbors complained. The whole reason they’d moved to a cul-de-sac was to avoid this kind of traffic.
“I think we’re losing the hearts and minds war,” Court worried at dinner after they’d endured the notoriety for three weeks. It had hit them both as a particularly low blow that Fluffernutter had defected to the purple tent just that morning. “I wonder if we should install one of those Central Americans after all. Better for our rep than advertising that getting Liam’s room back has made it possible to store bulk purchases from Costco.”
“Central Americans are old hat this summer,” Harriet said. “It would have to be a Syrian refugee.”
“Not sure you can get one on Amazon. Maybe I could ask my cousin George to move in. He’s got dark hair, and this time of year he’d have a tan.”
Whimsy wasn’t much help when the inevitable occurred: news teams descended from WSB-TV and Fox 5. As his parents peered around the carport, Liam held forth for the cameras with more lucidity than he’d ever employed at the dinner table, suggesting that perhaps his eviction would be the making of the man after all. Harriet couldn’t discern the whole interview, but did catch snippets—about “the well-off’s indifference to the plight of the less fortunate” and “the disenfranchised simply seeking a better life,” phrases he had clearly lifted wholesale from the coverage of the European migration crisis, as well as despair of “inter-generational inequality” and “the sacrifice of affordable housing to the scourge of luxury condominiums.”
Neither parent hungered for the limelight, but Harriet thought it vital that someone put the case for their side. So once a journalist again stalked toward the couple returning from work, she emerged onto the driveway. Having been conferring passionately with their supporters for the last month, she imagined that her arguments about young people only thriving from shouldering responsibility for themselves were in good order. But she hadn’t counted on the pounding terror that hit the moment the furry mic lunged at her face like a rabid stuffed animal. “But I liked living … When I was that age …” she blithered. “Little Five. Plates. They didn’t match, but they still went together.”
The journalist had that thank-God-this-isn’t-going-out-live look, and turned to Court. “What do you say to the charge some of your neighbors have made that throwing your own child out on the street is brutal and unfeeling?”
“I wouldn’t call a springy zoysia lawn the same as the street,” Court said defensively. “Besides, our son is always welcome in his own home.”
The man appeared put out. Obviously, if what Court just said was true, this was a nonstory. “So you’re officially inviting Mr. Friel-Garson to move back into the house? And this whole tent in the yard display is a stunt.”
“My wife wanted to make a point. It wasn’t my idea—all this commotion. Liam’s a good boy. And he’s wise beyond his years. Some young people—they’re too sensitive for this world. Forcing the likes of Liam to work reception at some downtown hotel—well, it would be a terrible waste of human capital.”
“Our son is always welcome in his own home?” Harriet quoted him back furiously once the news crews had packed up. “I sure don’t call that having my back!”
“I’m sorry,” Court said. “But I need to show you something.” He pulled out the family tablet and brought up supportthefreeloadingfive.com (whose fund-raising counter now read $21,347.50), albeit only to locate a link. “See? There was this guy Brian Haw in London, who camped out on Parliament Square to protest British foreign policy or something. Iraq and stuff. Everybody brought him food. Know how long he lived in that tent, which was covered in artwork and buttons, banners and placards—a massive eyesore in the center of London, for thousands of Chinese tourists to trip over? The whole time, constantly shouting down a megaphone at members of Parliament trying to work across the street and driving them nuts? Ten years.”
“I can’t imagine Liam having that kind of stamina.”
“I think stamina is exactly what he’s got,” Court said, with a rare contrariness. “And if their site is linking to Brian Haw, we may not have awakened his survival instinct so much as his competitive one. I bet he’d like to set a record.”
Harriet slumped at the kitchen table. She considered the indefinite plunking in their bedroom doorway, the inert keeping watch through the curtains when they first changed the locks, that improbable patience with cups filled, emptied, and filled again that went back to Liam’s toddlerhood. Inadvertently, in ejecting the boy from downstairs, they had converted their son from deadbeat to dissenter. They’d allowed him to find his calling. “So you want us to cave.”
“This Haw guy. They made documentaries about him. He ran for municipal office. He didn’t win, but he did win in the big picture. He won every day he stayed camped on that square. Meanwhile, Parliament tried passing all kinds of laws to get rid of him, and they didn’t work.”
“What did work, then? Finally, after ten years?”
“He died of cancer.”
“If we’re going head-to-head on mortality,” Harriet conceded, “I guess Liam’s got the edge.”
“Meanwhile, as far as most of the public is concerned, we look like jerks. We have a two-salary income and a full fridge and a four-bedroom empty nest that we don’t want him to keep living in on principle. But what’s the principle? That it’s better for him, and the country at large, for young people to bootstrap themselves the way we did. But when we came of age, housing and education were cheaper. Adjusted for inflation, wages were higher. So the ‘principle’ really comes down to we don’t want him here. Because it’s our house, and we’ve done our bit, and our hospitality has been exhausted. Because, you know, enough is enough already. We can make that case all right, but it sounds mean spirited.”
“Like, we don’t have to take care of him, so we won’t,” Harriet recapitulated. “But does it matter, what other people think?”
“Theoretically, maybe not. Realistically—yeah, it probably does. And this is an impasse. Even if we stand firm and take the flak, what’s the endgame? We don’t have one.”
THE BUNDLES OF paper towels and cases of tuna fish from Costco got stacked in the corner of the master bedroom. To reclaim the space, Harriet stopped abjuring her son not to waste whole rolls of Bounty on swabbing kitchen spills. Alicia found the O4W furniture under the carport a godsend when she established her own apartment. The round of dead grass from the tent never did grow back, and marked the front lawn forever after like a giant manhole cover. Jocanda got pregnant. If softened on the cracker boyfriend, her mother still had much less room in a luxury condo, so Jocanda moved into Wildwood Place once the little girl, Pebbles, was born; Germany had absorbed over a million migrants the previous year, in comparison with which taking in one mother and child couldn’t even count as bighearted. It made sense for Harriet and Court to shift downstairs, allowing Liam and Jocanda to assume the master bedroom—right across from the erstwhile home gym, now redecorated as a nursery. They lugged the StairMaster to the utility room. In the fullness of time, naturally the couple retired, and into their seventies displayed early-warning forgetfulness. According to their lawyer, the protocol was standard. Medicaid’s “look-back period” in Georgia was five years, so in order to keep from being penalized for transferring assets at under fair market value, advance planning was of the essence.