Best American Series - The Best American Series: 20 Short Stories and Essays

Dear Reader,

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the countrys finest short fiction and nonfiction. This special e-book contains eleven selections from the following 2011 editions:

The Best American Short Stories edited by Geraldine Brooks

The Best American Essays edited by Edwidge Danticat

The Best American Mystery Stories edited by Harlan Coben

The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Mary Roach

The Best American Sports Writing edited by Jane Leavy

The Best American Travel Writing edited by Sloane Crosley

Each volumes series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. The guest editor then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respectedand most popular of its kind.

We hope you enjoy the brilliant writing presented in this unique edition and invite you to delve further into the individual works.

Mariner Books

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Boston New York

eISBN 978-0-547-91397-1
v2.0121

FROM One Story

I AM MY OWN HOUSEWIFE, my own breadwinner. I make lunches and change light bulbs. I kiss bruises and kill copperheads from the backyard creek with a steel hoe. I change sheets and the oil in my car. I can make a pie crust and exterminate humpback crickets in the crawlspace with a homemade glue board, though not at the same time. I like to compliment myself on these things, because theres no one else around to do it.

Turn left, Ike says, in a falsetto British accent.

There is no leftonly a Carolina road that appears infinitely flat, surrounded by pines and the occasional car dealership billboard. I lost my mother last spring and am driving nine hours south on I-95 with a seven-year-old so that I might hear her voice again.

Exit approaching, he says from the back seat. Bear right.

Who are you today? I ask.

The lady that lives in the GPS, Ike says. Mary Poppins.

My son is a forty-three-pound drama queen, a mercurial shrimp of a boy who knows many of the words to Andrew Lloyd Webbers oeuvre. He draws two eyes and a mouth on the fogged-up window.

Baby, dont do that unless you have Windex in your backpack, I say.

Can you turn this song up? he says.

I watch him croon in the rearview mirror. He vogues like Madonna in his booster seat. His white-blond shag swings with the bass.

You should dress more like Gwen Stefani, he says.

I picture myself in lam hot pants and thigh-highs.

Do you need to pee? I ask. We could stop for lunch.

Ike sighs and pushes my old Wayfarers into his hair.

Chicken nuggets? he asks.

If I were a better mother, I would say no. If I were a better mother, there would be a Ziploc baggie in a cooler with a crustless PB&J, a plastic bin of carrot wedges and seedless grapes. If I were a better daughter, Ike would have known his grandmother, spent more time in her arms, wowed her with his impersonation of Christopher Plummers Captain von Trapp.

How many eggs could a pterodactyl lay at one time? Ike asks.

Probably no more than one, I say. One pterodactyl is enough for any mother.

How much longer? Ike asks.

Four hours.

Four hours till what?

Youll see, I say.

What Im having trouble explaining to Ike is this: Were driving to a small roadside zoo outside of Myrtle Beach so that I can hear my mothers voice ring through the beak of a thirty-six-year-old African gray parrot, a bird I hated, a bird that could beep like a microwave, ring like a phone, and sneeze just like me.

In moments of profound starvation, the exterminator told me, humpback crickets may devour their own legs, though they cannot regenerate limbs.

Hell of a party trick, I said.

Our house has been for sale for a year and two months and a contract has finally come in, contingent on a home inspection. The firm I work for has offered to transfer me to Connecticuta paralegal supervisory position in a state where Ike has a better chance of escaping childhood obesity, God, and conservative political leanings. I cant afford to leave until the house sells. My realtor has tried scented candles, toile valances, and apple pies in the oven, but no smokescreen will detract from the cricket infestation.

They jump, the realtor said before I left town with Ike. Whenever I open the door to the basement, they hurl themselves at me. Youll never pass a home inspection, he said. Theyre like spiders on steroids. Do something.

The exterminator already comes weekly, I said. And Ive installed sodium vapor bulbs.

Ill see you Sunday, the realtor said, walking to his compact convertible, his shirt crisp and tucked neatly into his pressed pants. Ill come over for a walk-through before the inspection.

That night Ike and I covered scrap siding in glue and flypaper and scattered our torture devices throughout the basement, hoping to reduce the number of crickets.

Youre coming down later to get the bodies, Ike said. Because Im not.

He shivered and stuck out his tongue at the crickets, which flung themselves from wall to ledge to ceiling.

What if we live here forever? he asked.

People used to do that, I said. Live in one house their entire life. My mother, for instance.

I pictured her house, a two-bedroom white ranch with window boxes, brick chimney, and decorative screen door. The driveway was unpavedan arc of sand, grass, and crushed oyster shells that led to a tin-covered carport. Growing up, there was no neighborhoodonly adjoining farms and country lots with rambling cow pastures. People didnt landscape in fancy ways then. Mom had tended her azaleas and boxwoods with halfhearted practicality, in case the chickens or sheep broke loose. The house, recently bought by a corporate real estate firm, was empty now, a tiny exoskeleton on a tree-cleared lot next to a Super Walmart.

I thought about Mom then, and her parrot. If we moved, this might be my last time to hear her voice.

I pull into a rest stop, one of those suspicious gas station and fast-food combos. Ike kicks the back of the passenger seat. I scowl in the rearview.

I need to stretch, he says. I have a cramp.

Ikes legs are the size of my wrist, hairless and pale. He is sweet and unassuming. He does not yet know he will be picked on for being undersized, for growing facial hair ten years too late.

I want to wrap him in plastic and preserve him so that he can always be this way, this content. To my heart, Ike is still a neonate, a soft body I could gently fold and carry inside of me again. You can just see the innocence falling off a childs faceevery day.

Ike and I lock the car and head into the gas station. A burly man with black hair curling across his shoulders hustles into the restroom. He breathes hard, scratches his ear, and checks his phone. Next, a sickly-looking man whose pants are too big shuffles inside. He pauses to wipe his forehead with an elbow. I think, These people are someones children.

I clench Ikes hand. I can feel his knuckles, the small bones beneath his flesh.

Inside, the toilets hiss. I hold Ike by the shoulders; I do not want him to go in alone.

Garlic burst, he reads from a cellophane bag. Big flavor!

I play with his cowlick. When he was born, I could see a whorl of hair on the crown of his head like a small, stagnant hurricane. Ike also had what the nurse called stork bites on the back of his neck and eyelids.