Page 51 - A Little Life: A Novel

the idea of putting the money directly into Malcolm’s wallet, and so every
two weeks after he’d cashed his check from the restaurant where he worked
on the weekends, he’d stuff two or three twenties into it while Malcolm was

asleep. He never quite knew if Malcolm noticed—he spent it so quickly,
and often on the three of them—but Willem took some satisfaction and
pride in doing it.
In the meantime, though, there was Hemming. He was glad he went
home (his mother had only sighed when he told her he was coming), and
glad to see Hemming, although alarmed by how thin he had become, how
he groaned and cried as the nurses prodded the area around his sutures; he’d

had to grab the sides of his chair to keep himself from shouting at them. At
nights, he and his parents would have silent meals; he could almost feel
them pulling away, as if they were unpeeling themselves from their lives as
parents of two children and readying themselves to drift toward a new
identity elsewhere.
On his third night, he took the keys to the truck to drive to the hospital.

Back east, it was early spring, but here the dark air seemed to glitter with
frost, and in the morning the grass was capped with a thin skin of crystals.
His father came onto the porch as he was walking down the steps. “He’ll
be asleep,” he said.
“I just thought I’d go,” Willem told him.
His father looked at him. “Willem,” he said, “he won’t know whether
you’re there or not.”

He felt his face go hot. “I know you don’t fucking care about him,” he
snapped at him, “but I do.” It was the first time he’d ever sworn at his
father, and he was unable to move for a moment, fearful and half excited
that his father might react, that they might have an argument. But his father
just took a sip from his coffee and then turned and went inside, the screen
door smacking softly shut behind him.

For the rest of his visit they were all the same as they always were; they
went in shifts to sit with Hemming, and when he wasn’t at the hospital,
Willem helped his mother with the ledgers, or his father as he oversaw the
reshodding of the horses. At nights he returned to the hospital and did
schoolwork. He read aloud from The Decameron to Hemming, who stared
at the ceiling and blinked, and struggled through his calculus, which he
finally finished with the unhappy certainty that he had gotten all of it

wrong. The three of them had gotten used to Jude doing their calculus for