Wichita (9781609458904) Read Online Free

Gray Mare.”
    â€œDid they consider adoption?” she asks now.
    â€œVirgil’s not into it.” That didn’t come out right.
    Abby scoffs. “No, of course not. The child might not grow up to be a professor.”
    Lewis decides not to take offense. Though he’s amazed at moments like this that she was ever married to his father. Her stock reply is that Virgil was a genetic catch. They met in the dining hall at UT Austin, where Abby was a sophomore, Virgil a post-doc fellow. When she got pregnant with Lewis, they got married and she dropped out and—to the undying horror of the Chopiks—never completed her degree.
    â€œSylvie says she doesn’t want to adopt at this point either,” Lewis adds now.
    In reply to which Abby smiles knowingly. “She’s not being given much choice, is she?” She’s nosing the Escalade into Forest Hills, the leafy subdivision where they’ve been in the same house since moving here from Austin, when her “lifetime companion” Cary was headhunted by Boeing.
    â€œI guess not,” Lewis admits. When they broke up a year later, Cary moved to Seattle but Abby stayed on here—along with Lewis and Seth, “her boys.”
    There are more pickup trucks in the driveways than he remembers ever seeing at once, shiny Fords and Dodges, red or black. Bass boats under tarpaulins, trailers with plywood siding. The tone is no-nonsense, stowed and lashed down, like military housing. There are no other cars on the streets, no one out walking. But fireflies throb in the twilit yards.
    It hits him as they approach their street: they’ve driven home from the airport without talking about Seth, the latest meds, whether there’s been any recent “ideation.” In an email she sent Lewis two weeks ago, Abby announced that she had landed Seth a summer job at a kind of art school/spa for the wealthy on a former ranch near Vail. Mornings, he models for life drawing classes; afternoons, he does lawn and pool maintenance. The nude modeling Lewis can picture. That actually suits Seth to a T. It’s the laboring in the summer heat for an hourly wage that resists coming into focus. Has Seth ever even had a job? Yes, as a dishwasher, and he quit halfway through the first shift. He’s tried competitive skateboarding, he’s tried modeling for catalogues. He’s tried singing in a band, he’s tried acting. He looked into applying to art schools, bringing a portfolio of drawings to New York. None of it has come to anything. Lewis holds out a squalid little hope that Seth will become a rock or film star but will settle for his survival at this point. Meanwhile, he’s really glad he’s out of town.
    But suddenly Abby is braking and here Seth is, waving his arms in the middle of the street as if flagging down a car on a country road. His blue jeans ride low over white boxers and covering his collarbone is a swath of new-tattoo bandage, which glows faintly in the dusk. Tats everywhere, including part of his face, so that his lithe, fat-free body is nearly black with ink. He has a short-cropped, hacked-at looking haircut, which, if it’s meant to diminish a handsomeness that verges on pretty, just gives it something to triumph over. He looks like a squatter punk parachuted into Kansas from the Haight or the East Village.
    â€œHe showed up a couple of days ago,” Abby says helplessly. “He wanted to surprise you.” She must have worried Lewis wouldn’t come if he knew. Lewis sighs and rakes a hand through his hair, playing the part, but in fact he feels a sort of all-bets-are-off happiness at the sight of his brother.
    Seth has his arms braced on the grill as if he brought the car to a halt with super-human strength. He springs onto the hood and makes a “forward, ho!” chop with one arm, a gesture Lewis saw a tank driver make on CNN during the invasion of Iraq.
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