Vintage Ford by Richard Ford

didn’t have too many more conversations after that. My mother sent him away in the winter. Once or twice he returned but, at some point, he disappeared. Though by then her life had changed in the bad way it probably had been bound to change.
    The only time I remember my mother speaking directly to me during these three days, other than to inform me dinner was ready or that she was leaving at night to go out to some booking Dubinion had arranged, which I’m sure she paid him to arrange (and paid for the chance to sing as well), was on Wednesday afternoon, when I was sitting on the back porch poring over the entrance requirement information I’d had sent from Lawrenceville. I had never seen Lawrenceville, or been to New Jersey, never been farther away from New Orleans than to Yankeetown, Florida, where my military school was located in the buildings of a former Catholic hospital for sick and crazy priests. But I thought that Lawrenceville—just the word itself—could save me from the impossible situation I deemed myself to be in. To go to Lawrenceville, to travel the many train miles, and to enter whatever strange, complex place New Jersey was—all that coupled to the fact that my father had gone there and my name and background meant something—all that seemed to offer escape and relief and a future better than the one I had at home in New Orleans.
    My mother had come out onto the back porch, which was glassed in and gave a prospect down onto the backyard grass. On the manicured lawn was an arrangement of four wooden Adirondack chairs and a wooden picnic table, all painted pink. The yard was completely walled in and no one but our neighbors could see—if they chose to—that William Dubinion was lying on top of the pink picnic table with his shirt off, smoking a cigarette and staring sternly up at the warm blue sky.
    My mother stood for a while watching him. She was wearing a pair of men’s white silk pajamas, and her voice was husky. I’m sure she was already taking the drugs that would eventually disrupt her reasoning. She was holding a glass of milk, which was probably not just milk but milk with gin or scotch or something in it to ease whatever she felt terrible about.
    â€œWhat a splendid idea to go hunting with your father,” she said sarcastically, as if we were continuing a conversation we’d been having earlier, though in fact we had said nothing about it, despite my wanting to talk about it, and despite thinking I ought to not go and hoping she wouldn’t permit it. “Do you even own a gun?” she asked, though she knew I didn’t. She knew what I did and didn’t own. I was fifteen.
    â€œHe’s going to give me one,” I said.
    She glanced at me where I was sitting, but her expression didn’t change. “I just wonder what it’s like to take up with another man of your social standing,” my mother said as she ran her hand through her hair, which was newly colored ash-blond and done in a very neat bob, which had been Dubinion’s idea. My mother’s father had been a pharmacist on Prytania Street and had done well catering to the needs of rich families like the McKendalls. She had gone to Newcombe, married
up
and come to be at ease with the society my father introduced her into (though I have never thought she really cared about New Orleans society one way or the other—unlike my father, who cared about it enough to spit in its face).
    â€œI always assume,” she said, “that these escapades usually involve someone on a lower rung. A stevedore, or a towel attendant at your club.” She was watching Dubinion. He must’ve qualified in her mind as a lower-rung personage. She and my father had been married twenty years, and at age thirty-nine she had taken Dubinion into her life to wipe out any trace of the way she had previously conducted her affairs. I realize now, as I tell this, that she and Dubinion