All Families Are Psychotic

Chapter One Janet opened her eyes Florida's prehistoric glare dazzled outside the motel window. A dog barked; a car honked; a man was singing a snatch of a Spanish song. She absentmindedly touched the scar from the bullet wound beneath her left rib cage, a scar that had healed over, bumpy and formless and hard, like a piece of gum stuck beneath a tabletop. She hadn't expected her flesh to have healed so blandly What was I expecting, a scar shaped like an American flag? Janet's forehead flushed:My children where are they?She did a rapid-fire tally of the whereabouts of her three children, a ritual she'd enacted daily since the birth of Wade back in 1958. Once she'd mentally placed her offspring in their geographic slots, she remembered to breathe:They're all going to be here in Orlando today. She looked at the motel's bedside clock: 7:03 A.M.Pill o'clock. She took two capsules from her prescription pill caddie and swallowed them with tap water gone flat overnight, which now tasted like nickels and pennies. It registered on her that motel rooms now came equipped with coffee makers.What a sensible idea, so bloody sensible why didn't they do this years ago? Why is all the good stuff happening now? A few days back, on the phone, her daughter, Sarah, had said, 'Mom, at least buy Evian, OK? The tap water in that heap is probably laced with crack. I can'tbelieveyou chose to stay there.' 'But dear, I don't mind it here.' 'Go stay at the Peabody with the rest of the family. I've told you a hundred times I'll pay.' 'That's not the point, dear. A hotel really ought not cost more than this.' 'Mom, NASA cuts deals with the hotels, and ...' Sarah made a puff of air, acknowledging defeat. 'Forget it. But I think you're too well off to be pulling your Third World routine.' Sarah so cavalier with money! as were the two others. None had known poverty, and they'd never known war, but the advantage hadn't made them golden, and Janet had never gotten over this fact. A life of abundance had turned her two boys into an element other than gold lead? silicon? bismuth? But thenSarah Sarah was an element finer than gold carbon crystallized as diamond a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash, sliced into strips, and stored in a vault. Janet's phone rang and she answered it: Wade, calling from an Orange County lock-up facility. Janet imagined Wade in a drab concrete hallway, unshaven and disheveled, yet still radiating 'the glint' the spark in the eye he'd inherited from his father. Bryan didn't have it and Sarah didn't need it, but Wade had glinted his way through life, and maybe it hadn't been the best attribute to inherit after all. Wade: Janet remembered being back home, and driving along Marine Drive in the morning, watching a certain type of man waiting for a bus to take him downtown. He'd be slightly seedy and one or two notches short of respectability; it was always patently clear he'd lost his driver's license after a DWI, but this only made him more interesting, and whenever Janet smiled at one of these men from her car, they fired a smile right back. And that was Wade and, in some unflossed cranny of her memory, her ex-husband, Ted. 'Dear, aren't you too old to be calling me from jail?Even saying the word "jail" feels silly.' 'Mom, I don't do bad stuff any more. This was a fluke.' 'Okay then, what happened did you accidentally drive a busload of Girl Guides into the Everglades?' 'It was a bar brawl, Mom.' Janet repeated this: 'A bar brawl.' 'I know, I know you think I don't know how idiotic that sounds? I'm phoning because I need a ride away from this dump. My rental car's back at the bar.' 'WherCoupland, Douglas is the author of 'All Families Are Psychotic' with ISBN 9780679311836 and ISBN 0679311831.