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Show •52 "He was a failure. I don't know why he had to be-he was intelligent, he was a handsome man, he worked hard all his life. But it came down to nothing. A sixty-year old man who liked to sit up in a tree. The whole town laughed at him-don't tell me they didn't: I remember. And the final joke's on him too," I said, pointing at the loaded shelves in the kitchen, mason-jars darkly gleaming, strings of onions hung from the ceiling to dry. "He spent all his time planning to survive the Great Famine but now he's dead. It's funny, don't you see," I said. "Whores," Carlo said. He looked carefully at the stump of his banana and finished it off with one bite. "Bitches." I dried my eyes with the back of my hand. "If you're talking about his women I agree with you. Except for Jacob's mother, maybe." "She didn't really die," Jacob said. "Adam made up that lie to make us feel better. She ran off with a car salesman from Albany when I was eight." "Well, there you are," I said. "With a life like that who wouldn't jump?" "Carlo's crying," Morgan said. He shook his head and tried to grin but the tears filled his eyes. She pulled him down into the empty chair beside her and whispered in his ear. The words weren't meant for me but in the quiet of the room they floated across the table. "Nobody ever understood |