The Affinities Read Online Free Page B

bad thing once I had a towel in my hand and a roof over my head. In the bathroom I looked at my cheek where the cop had clubbed me. The bruise was fading. All that was left of the gash was a pale pink line. But I dreamed of the incident that night, when the room was dark and the rain on the window sounded like the roar of massed voices.
    *   *   *
    Ten days passed.
    Two interviews for a summer internship went nowhere. I finished an end-of-term project (a Flash video animation) and handed it in. I fretted about my future.
    On the tenth day I opened an email from InterAlia Inc. My test results had been assessed, it said, and I had been placed in an Affinity. Not just any Affinity, but Tau, one of the big five. My test fees would be debited to my credit card, the email went on to say. And I would be hearing from a local tranche shortly.
    *   *   *
    I was headed to school when my phone burbled. I didn’t let it go to voice mail. I picked up like a good citizen.
    It was Aaron. “Things took a turn for the worse,” he said. “Grammy Fisk’s back in the hospital. And this time you really need to come down and see her.”

 
    CHAPTER 2
    The town of Schuyler was situated at the northeastern corner of the New York State county of Onenia. “Onenia” was a corruption of the Mohawk word onenia’shon:’a, meaning “various rocks,” and for more than a century Schuyler’s primary business had been its quarries: pits carved into the fragile karst that underlay the county’s unproductive farmland. Since the 1970s most of those quarries had grown unprofitable and had been shut down, left to fill with greasy brown water that rose in the spring and evaporated over the course of the long summers. As a child I had been warned never to play around the old quarries, and of course every kid I knew had gone there as often as possible, biking down county roads where grasshoppers flocked in the heat like flurries of buzzing brown snow.
    On the way to my father’s house I drove past trailheads I still recognized, hidden entrances to pressed-earth roads where trucks had once carted limestone to stoneworks across the state. Stone from Onenia County had helped build scores of libraries and government buildings, back when libraries and government buildings still commanded a certain respect. On Schuyler’s main street there were a few remnants of that era: an old bank, gutted to house a Gap store but still wearing its limestone fa ç ade; a Carnegie library in the Federal style, with a tiny acreage of public park to separate it from the liquor store on one side and the welfare office on the other. All dark now: I had left Toronto in an afternoon drizzle and reached Schuyler just after a rainy sunset.
    Despite hard times there was still a “good” part of Schuyler, where the town’s diminishing stock of prosperous families kept house: families like the Fisks, the Symanskis, the Cassidys, the Muellers. The windows of their houses glittered as if their wealth had been compressed into rectilinear slabs of golden light, and the houses seemed to promise ease, comfort, safety, all the consolations of family—though this was often false advertising.
    I pulled into the driveway of my father’s house and parked next to Aaron’s Lexus and behind my father’s Lincoln Navigator. The same comforting light spilled out of the house’s windows, painting the rain-slick leaves of the willow in the yard. But no one was happy inside. The family crowded around as I came through the door: my father, my brother, my stepmother Laura. Twelve-year-old Geddy stood behind Mama Laura, and when I approached him he offered his hand with a solemnity that might have been funny under other circumstances. I noticed his hair had been cut into a military-style buzz, probably as a result of my father’s crusades to make Geddy “more masculine.” I had