American Girl: A Novel by Wendy Walker

Author:Wendy Walker [Walker, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Dusty has a gun. His father gave it to him when he “became a man.” It was some kind of family tradition. Every Madison gave it to his firstborn son, and that son gave it to his firstborn son, and so on. If no son had a son, then it was given to the next-born male heir. Because apparently women have no use for guns.

The gun is very old, and my mom makes him keep it in the attic. He takes it out a few times a year to clean it and fire at empty cans in the woods with his boys. Seems like it’s all a big waste of time, but the boys like it more than anything, maybe even more than video games.

Rule Number Four: All feelings are the result of chemical reactions in the brain.

When Dusty takes his boys to shoot cans, he pats their backs and hugs them and kisses them and tells them how much he loves them, and this releases dopamine in their brains, which is the chemical that makes us feel good. So now just talking about that stupid gun and shooting cans in the woods makes them happy.

I know the gun is kept in a box with Dusty’s old trophies from sports when he was little. Dusty wasn’t very athletic, so when I go up there to look for it, I start with the smaller boxes in the back.

My mom has labeled the boxes so it’s easier to find decorations for all of our holidays. And there are a lot of them. Christmas. Easter. Memorial Day. Fourth of July. Halloween. Thanksgiving. And, of course, birthdays. They are the same every year because, she says, that’s how you create family traditions. By hanging the same flags and ornaments and using the same dishes and tablecloths. Every year on every event, I evaluate my dopamine. I wait for a surge to come when I see the things from these boxes. The advent calendar. The fake spiders and ghosts. The little white lights that get strung around the tree we get at the fake farm three exits past The Hand of God on the interstate. I remember when it used to happen. Before, when we lived in our shitty apartment. Somewhere along the way it stopped. Now I only get that rush from things outside the walls of this house. My people at The Triple S. Ian. Thoughts of college. I don’t have time to feel sad about it, though it’s right there, knocking on the door. I have too much to do.

I go through box after box, until one of them makes me stop. I haven’t seen this box since I was ten, a box that used to live in the closet at our shitty apartment, that is sealed with the silver duct tape my mom used to keep the roaches from squeezing through the floorboards.

It was one of the boxes that my grandparents put out for the collectors the day after we ran for our lives when I was five.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.