Roughly six months later I set off. Obama had won, the economy was going down the tubes, it seemed a good time to try something new. My dad loaned me five thousand dollars and I spent three hundred bucks of it on a secondhand car—a ’91 Taurus, the last in the series to offer a stick shift. I figured the shittier the better. On my last night at home, after supper, my father went into the yard to smoke a cigarette. He smoked maybe one or two a month, and it always put my mother in a sour mood. She made a pot of decaf and passed me a cup across the kitchen table.
“He’s worried about you, that’s why he’s smoking again,” she said. “You’re too old to play games like this.”
“That’s just not true, he always smokes—a little. What I’m too old for is living at home with you guys.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You sound like Granma Dot,” I said.
A year before she died, after a bad stroke, my grandmother came to live with us. She didn’t want to be a burden, and if you asked her anything like, what do you want for lunch, she answered, “I don’t mind.” My father used to beg her for an answer, something specific, but she never budged; it drove him crazy. At the same time she was highly critical of everything: the heat, the people, the food.
She died from a staph infection after hip-replacement surgery. This was around Easter of my sophomore year in high school. After the funeral, for which my mom held it together pretty well, she waited until we were alone and then broke down. I was helping her write out thank-you cards; a few friends from Puyallup had sent flowers.
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “She was really old. I don’t think she—”
But my mother shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “I wanted you to like her more. I don’t think you liked her very much. But when I was a girl, she was my mother, there was no one else.”
Of course, this was true for me, too, and here was my mother sitting across the kitchen table. Every year she looked more like Granma. Dot had bad eyes, there was a kind of film over them, like the skin on warm cream, and glasses made her eyes seem bulgy. My mother had started wearing glasses, too, and not just for reading. With her hair cut short she looked like an old little girl.
Then my father clattered in the door, bringing some of the smoke smell with him. “Come on, kid, you’ve got a long drive tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
He put his hand to the side of my face, so I turned my cheek against it.
“Mom says you’re worried about me,” I said.
“That’s our job. It’s your job not to mind too much.”
After brushing my teeth and changing into pajamas, I came back into the kitchen to kiss her good night. She was still sitting at the table, which was covered in the bright plastic sunflowers of the tablecloth; they glared under the hanging lamp. My mother let me kiss her sitting down.
“Greg,” she said, before I turned away. “I know you won’t do anything deliberately stupid. That’s not your style. But you’re the kind of person who could get himself into situations that you won’t be very good at getting out of. There will be people there who don’t want you there. They don’t think like you do—”
“You mean black people?” I said.
“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I mean. But I’ve been doing what Brad always tells me not to do, I’ve been looking things up on the computer. Detroit is the number one most violent city in America.”
“No worse than New Orleans.”
“New Orleans is bad enough—that’s why we moved out. But there are good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. From what I understand, you plan on living right in the middle of the worst.”
“You’re totally out of touch with these things, Mom. All you know is what you read online or see on TV. The news and entertainment industries in this country sell fear, it’s what they do, because people like you want to buy it. But that doesn’t make it true.”
“Who is they? I don’t know who they is. This is starting to make me angry. You said yourself it’s a war zone.”
“That wasn’t me, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to have this conversation now.”
Bending down, I kissed her good night again, and then again and again on each cheek, to lighten the mood. But she only sat there, softening into grumpiness. “You’re making a joke out of it. It’s not a joke.”
“Can I say one thing?” I said. “Don’t blame Dad for lending me the money.”
This conversation left a taste in my mouth, because of what I said or what she said, I don’t know. It’s unpleasant to see your parents for what they are, limited people. But you get into stupid fights with them anyway, you’re all tangled up. And afterwards you have to deal with the fact that you don’t always believe your own point of view.
My dreams that night were very near the surface, they were very plausible. I was getting gas and looking through my wallet for dollar bills. It was a full-service station and I never know how much to tip. Later, back on the road, the lanes seemed narrow, there was a problem with my headlights or the windscreen wipers. I kept falling asleep. I should have pulled over but that’s how people get killed in this country, sleeping by the side of the highway. So I lowered the window to let some fresh air in. That only helped a little, every few seconds my head jerked up. I could hear my father in the kitchen, making French toast, and then he came into my bedroom singing, Wake up, you beautiful girl, which had been playing on the radio.
After breakfast we loaded up the car. My mother kept thinking of something else for me to take and cluttered the trunk with a hundred odd things for setting up house—a flashlight, packs of batteries and toilet paper, her old coffeemaker. But then there was nothing else and I drove off.
She waited in the driveway until she couldn’t see me—this is what she always does after our visits home. I watched her in the rearview mirror. When I turned the corner, and a new street slid over to replace the street I grew up on, with other houses and trees and nobody standing in the drive, I felt like you feel when you put the phone down and the room is suddenly different.
Around lunchtime I stopped at the Walmart outside Hattiesburg and bought a gun. The guy behind the counter—a black guy, as it happens, with a dude-like mustache—was low-key, practical and encouraging.
“What do you want it for?” he said.
“Duck hunting. I’m just getting started.”
“We got a Ruger Red Label. That’s a real classic gun, a nice starter gun. It’ll last you, too.”
“Last time I went out I used a Remington.”
So he suggested a Remington 870 Express with a compact pump and listed other specs, which I didn’t understand.
“Will it fit under the seat of my car?”
“What are you driving?” he said and handed me the catalog to look at while the FBI check cleared. There was a form you had to fill out—I gave my parents’ address in Baton Rouge. Afterwards, we talked about shells.
“It depends what you want to use it for,” he said. “Are we talking home defense or hunting ducks? Because there’s different things I’d recommend.” He also suggested a couple of accessories, a TacStar SideSaddle, an Elzetta light mount, with a Fenix LD10. “That’s a strong light,” he said. “If that catch somebody in the eye, give you an extra couple of seconds. Give you a chance to see who it is.” He put everything in a doubled-up paper bag.
I picked up some car snacks, too, chips and soda and brown bread and sliced cheese. As I pulled back onto I-59 a crowd of feelings went over me in a wave. Here we go, I thought, here we come. But I still had another fifteen hours of driving, and a night to get through at a Days Inn motel, before reaching Detroit.