Chapter 2

"What do you mean, 'I'm not coming?' It's Thanksgiving, Will. You've never missed Thanksgiving with us."

His mother sounded positively indignant, as if he had proposed to cancel the holiday season altogether, but he was prepared to make his case.

"I am not interested if it's at Bob's place this year, mom. Why can't we do it over at home just like every damn year? Bob doesn't even have the space to put us all up for the night. I'm not sleeping on a camping mattress again, and the next hotel is a half hour from his house."

"Oh, but he does have the space. They finally finished Erica's new room over the garage, so they have an extra guestroom now. I'm sure they'd let you have it. I'll just sleep on the couch."

Well, shit, Will thought. There goes my main argument.

"New room over the garage? Like a den? The girl is what, fourteen? She doesn't need a den that's separate from the rest of the house. Does he let her smoke weed and drive his truck, too?"

"She's fifteen, Will. You'd remember that if you ever remembered to send birthday cards out like a well-mannered human being."

"Mom, trying to give me a bad conscience won't work." But it did, and he knew that she had his concession in the bag once again. He sighed loudly.

"You don't have to play the martyr and sleep on the couch in your own son's home, mom. I'll sleep on the damn couch."

"Does that mean you're going to stop pouting and come have a Thanksgiving with us just like every year? He is your brother, you know," she added in a conciliatory tone.

"Yeah, I'll come. Just don't expect me to stay sober for very long once I am there."

His mother chuckled.

"It's the holidays, dear. Everybody gets drunk. It's a law, I believe."

Will hit the "End Call" button on his battered cell phone with a sigh. The last thing he felt like doing this week was to take advantage of Bob's hospitality. His brother was so different from Will that not even the birth certificates had ever fully convinced him of a shared genetic lineage.

Will's house stood in a quiet neighborhood of the quiet town of Ellsworth, Maine. This was Main Street, USA, where people left their doors unlocked, and where nobody gave much of a rat's ass about famous writers. This suited Will just fine. Ellsworth was just close enough to Boston and New York City to still have the convenience of proximity, and it was just far enough away from his mother's house in Augusta to offer a convenient excuse for limited family visits. His brother Bob lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was the ass end of the world as far as Will was concerned. Of course, it wouldn't have mattered much if Bob lived in the house down the street. Will and Bob had avoided each other as much as possible since they moved out of their parents' house, and that, too, suited Will just fine.

He walked into his study, past the travel bag in the hall that he had yet to unpack. His Powerbook sat on the desk, sleep light blinking softly. He sat down in his high-backed leather work chair and pulled himself close to the desk. There was a light layer of dust on the uncluttered work surface, and he wiped it away with the palm of his hand.

Will woke the laptop from its sleep and checked the Internet for airfares. Ten minutes later, he closed the web browser in disgust. The cheapest flight was close to seven hundred dollars, undoubtedly twice the rate it wuld have been outside of the holiday season. He had the money, to be sure, but he didn't want to spend it on general principle, to avoid adding the insult of the expense to the injury of having to spend Thanksgiving at Bob's house.

A lovely drive, then, he thought. It was roughly a thousand miles to Knoxville, and it would require a stay-over in Maryland or northern Virginia along the way. The drive would give him time to listen to a book or two, and he wouldn't have to endure getting x-rayed and strip-searched by barely sentient primates in ill-fitting polyester uniforms.

Will looked at the Powerbook's desktop, where a half dozen folders with different project names neatly hugged the right side of the screen, sorted alphabetically. He hadn't looked at them in a few weeks, and his guilty conscience compelled him to open the most recent one. He had written four different attempts at a first chapter for a new story. They all stank to high heaven, but he loathed deleting even crummy work, so they remained on his hard drive. He opened the last version of his abortive first chapter, read through it, and closed the file again. He hadn't worked on the story in at least a month, and it was as stale and smelly as old fish now.

Will closed the lid of the laptop, putting it back into sleep mode, and rationalized that it was pointless to start anything new right before leaving town for Thanksgiving anyway. Maybe the muse would strike on the drive to Tennessee, and he'd finally be able to actually finish something for a change.

He dumped the contents of the travel bag onto his bed, filled it up with some clean clothes from the closet, and put the toiletries bag on top of the fresh laundry. After a moment of contemplation, he went back into his study and unplugged the laptop, carrying it back into the bedroom and depositing it in the bag along with the wall charger. He had little motivation to get any actual work done this week, but at least he'd be able to surf the Web and play a round of chess or two at the motel along the way.

His car was a nearly new BMW 328I, subdued charcoal in color. The regular royalty checks from his book made it possible for him to upgrade his vehicle every two years, a schedule he had been keeping consistently for the last decade. He tended to stick with the BMW because it wasn't overly flashy, but luxurious, and not afflicted with the rich fuddy-duddy image of a Town Car or a large Benz. His New Year's day ritual every year was to buy a new laptop, always the latest model Powerbook, and every other year, he stopped at the BMW dealership afterwards to trade his two-year-old ride in on a new vehicle. He never even wore down the first set of tires on any of his cars. This particular 328I was due to be traded in another month, and with the upcoming trip to Tennessee, it would have just under 20,000 miles on the odometer. His accountant hated the practice, muttering dark words under his breath whenever Will shrugged off his warnings about depreciation loss.

Will tossed his travel bag into the trunk, checked to make sure that he had his wallet and cell phone on him, and started up the car. He had topped off the tank when he got home from the airport yesterday, so there was no reason to even get off the highway until he reached his stopover point.

On the Interstate, he set the cruise control to a cop-safe speed, eight miles over the limit, and shifted his brain into autopilot mode once again.

Sixteen hours of driving time and an uneventful stay at a generic chain motel later, Will rolled into Knoxville. It was early afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving, and the highways leading south had been thick with holiday traffic. Will hated traffic on the best of days, and Thanksgiving seemed to bring out all the idiots who got their licenses in a Happy Meal, and who only took the Mercury Medicare out onto the Interstate for that one occasion every year.

Bob's house was a bit off the beaten track, located on a cul-de-sac in a quiet North Knoxville neighborhood. The houses were all mostly identical brick structures, a ready-made upper middle class neighborhood that had been hammered out of the ground just a few years prior. Will loathed the generic architecture of these neighborhoods. To him, they were the residential equivalent of the equally generic MacMall shopping centers that were sprouting up in every town now, all sporting the same combination of Starbucks, Olive Garden, and Pier One. He wasn't surprised that in-car GPS systems were the hot new item these days; anyone living in one of these suburbs would need satellite navigation to find their way around among all the identical rows of housing.

Bob's house looked mostly like the rest of the neighborhood, but the addition above the garage his mother had mentioned gave the house a little bit of individuality. His brother's truck was parked in the driveway just in front of the closed garage, a ten-year-old Dodge pickup with a fading dark blue paint job and rough spray-on liner in the bed. Will pulled his BMW into the driveway next to the Dodge and killed the engine, appraising the outside of the house. There was a small cluster of pansies in the flower bed right outside the door, and Will was surprised to see that some of them were still in bloom in late November. It was the South, he reminded himself, and this place probably didn't see snow more than twice in a decade.

He snatched his travel bag out of the trunk and trotted up to the front door, where he ignored the doorbell and used the decorative brass knocker.

He heard swift footsteps inside, and he was pleased to see his niece answering the door. Erica had her mother's long auburn hair, and her quiet and easygoing disposition. As far as Will could tell, Erica had inherited very little of Bob's physical features or his temperament, and that would have made her his favorite niece even if she wasn't the only grandchild in the family.

"Hi, Uncle Will," she said, and stood on the toes of her running shoes to hug him and kiss him on the cheek. "Did you have a good trip?"

"Yeah, it wasn't bad at all, except for all the morons trying to steer their cars with their butts while eating hamburgers and talking on their phones."

She smiled at this, the trademark close-mouthed Erica smile with slightly pursed lips. She had taken to smiling with her mouth closed when she got braces, and the habit had remained even after the braces had come off earlier this year.

"Where's your mom?"

"Went to the airport, to pick up grandma. Dad's upstairs in his study. Want a drink?"

"Sure, if there's any beer in the fridge that's worth drinking. Why didn't he go and pick up his own mother instead of sending your mom?"

She shrugged her shoulders in the noncommittal way exclusive to teenagers.

"No idea. Maybe mom had to make a run to the store anyway."

He followed Erica into the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and studied the assortment of beer crammed into the top shelf. Will looked over her shoulder and shook his head.

"Cranberry fucking ale. Cranberries belong in a bog or in a sauce with a turkey, that's it. There's no place for them in beer."

"If you say so. You know I have no hands-on knowledge of the matter, being underage and all."

"Right," Will said with a smile. "Your lips have never touched a bottle of beer, I'm sure."

"I swear," she said, maintaining an admirably steady deadpan expression.

"So I hear you have new digs."

"Yeah." Her face brightened momentarily. "I moved in last month. It's right over the garage, and I have my own bathroom and fridge and all."

"Festive," Will smirked. "You can have all kinds of boys in there, and your folks would never even know it."

"Yeah, right," she said, and the smile faded from her face as quickly as it had come. "The boys at my school like bimbettes and cheerleaders. They don't usually go for soccer players with four-point oh GPAs. Not that I am sad about that, mind you."

"You're wise beyond your years, Erica. In another ten years, you'll be dating in your class, and the jocks at your high school will serve you French fries at the burger joint."

"Like hell," she said. "I'm planning on having a moving truck waiting at my graduation. This place sucks."

"Where do you want to go to college?"

"Anywhere but here. In fact, I'll pick the one that's as far away from here as possible. University of Alaska, or something."

"Like I said, wise beyond your years," he smiled.

Will could hear the drumming of his brother's computer keyboard even as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. Bob liked the old IBM keyboards that clicked loudly when you pressed a key, and typing at sixty words a minute made a thunderous racket. Bob liked those old ugly beige monstrosities so much that he had gotten a half dozen used ones on the Internet, just so he could have plenty of spares for the next decade or two.

Bob was hunched over his keyboard, typing away at a steady pace without looking at his fingers, the light from the flat panel screen reflecting on his glasses. He was two inches shorter than Will, and fifty pounds heavier. Bob had also inherited the balding gene from his maternal grandfather, sporting an aggressively receding hairline where Will still had thick and plentiful hair. He looked up when Will stepped into the room, and ceased his frantic typing at once.

"Well, hello there, Will. You made it down here in one piece."

"Yeah, barely. Too many morons out on the road for Turkey Day. How are things in the pulp factory?"

"Good, good." Bob smiled, letting the jab go unacknowledged. "You know how it goes, there's always a deadline around the corner. I could stay locked up here eight hours a day and seven days a week, and still not get everything off my plate."

Will stepped over to the bookshelf that took up one entire side of the room. There were plenty of style manuals, the majority of the Writer's Digest book club selections, and a whole row of shelving dedicated to Bob's own books. None of them bore his actual name, of course. Bob had a pen name for each of the three genres he covered: bodice rippers, sex, and action-adventure pulp that mostly centered around impossibly hard to kill ex-commando troopers eradicating legions of terrorists in highly implausible scenarios.

"Yeah, the market cries out for more..." he looked at the spine of one of the action novels, "... Thorn McAllister novels." He pulled the book out of the bookshelf and surveyed the cover art, which featured a heavily muscled guy with a pistol in each hand and no shirt to cover his impressive physique. "Geez, Bob, do you even bother looking at the galleys when they send them to you? Do they even bother with galleys?"

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A Bettered Life

Michael Lindgren

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