And there were times when he thought he’d fallen into the looking glass, just like Alice. Dealing with his mother as a near-enemy would do that to him. However much he tried, he couldn’t think of her any other way now. She’d blown up the family. What else was he supposed to think about her?
His dad’s new wife . . . He liked Kelly. He liked her better than he liked the woman who’d given him birth. But she didn’t seem like a mother to him, or even like a stepmother, however a stepmother was supposed to seem (what he knew about stepmothers was a weird mash-up of fairy tales on the one hand and friends and acquaintances whose folks had divorced and remarried on the other).
What she really reminded him of was a new older sister. He also liked her better than he’d ever liked Vanessa, though. Why not? She didn’t try to boss him around the way Vanessa always had. She didn’t make as if she knew everything there was to know, either. She just . . . got along with him. He wasn’t remotely used to that.
He would have liked to talk it over with Dad. His father was the one unchanged point in his life. Dad might be a little grayer, a little jowlier, than he had been when Marshall was in high school, but how often did you notice that? His style hadn’t changed, not a nickel’s worth. And wasn’t the style the man himself? Somebody’d said that. Marshall couldn’t remember who. So much for the bachelor’s degree they’d finally made him take.
But, because Dad was Dad, Marshall couldn’t imagine talking to him in any serious way. Dad would listen. He’d listen hard, like the cop he was. And then he’d give forth with something that might as well come from Mars. Which was one reason Marshall didn’t try talking with him: he’d had that happen before. The other reason, of course, was much older and more basic. Marshall had expended a lot of time and testosterone gaining such flimsy independence as he had. Was he going to risk that for the sake of conversation? Like hell he was.
And so he had to find some other way to channel his confusion. He put it into a story. Not only was he channeling it, he was giving himself a chance to make some money from it. He did sell things—less often than he wanted to, but he did. The money was nice, but he couldn’t begin to live on it. Nobody could live on what you made from short fiction. Everybody said so, and for once everybody seemed right.
He could talk about that with Kelly: no testosterone involved there. She thought for a little while, then said, “Maybe you should write a novel.”
“A novel? Are you nuts?” Marshall made a cross with his two index fingers, as if trying to protect himself against vampires. “I couldn’t write a novel!”
“Why not? You sell some of what you write.” Kelly was painfully precise—even more so than Dad. Did that go with being a geologist or just with being her? Marshall wasn’t sure, but either way . . . She went on, “That’s got to mean you’re good enough, right?”
“Jeez, I dunno,” Marshall muttered. What he did know was that the idea of tackling a novel scared him shitless.
Kelly didn’t want to let it go. “You can make a living on novels, can’t you?” she asked.
“If you’re lucky enough, maybe.” Marshall didn’t want to admit anything. But she had a point, or the blogs and Twitter feeds and bulletin boards he haunted made him think she did. You wrote short stories for glory or experiment or because you liked a little idea so much you couldn’t not write it. Novels, now, novels paid bills—except when they didn’t.
“So go for it. What have you got to lose?” Kelly could be most infuriating when she sounded most reasonable.
“My mind?” Marshall suggested. One more thing everybody always said was Don’t quit your day job. Considering that his day job was taking care of his half-brother, dumping it didn’t seem half bad. It wasn’t that he had anything personal against James Henry. The baby was probably as nice as a baby was gonna be. He couldn’t help it that, just by coming along, he’d fucked up a whole bunch of lives.
Being able to tell Mom to find somebody who really was a babysitter, though? That sounded pretty good. If he never messed with another poopy diaper as long as he lived, he wouldn’t shed one single, solitary tear. Dad always claimed babies weren’t really human till they got potty-trained. Marshall hadn’t known about that one way or the other before. He believed it now.
Making real money, grown-up money, sounded pretty good, too. Zero chance of doing that with short stories. Your chances of doing it with novels weren’t what anybody would call good, but they weren’t zero, either. People did make a living writing novels. One or two of them even got rich.