2
" You’re surprisingly bald, Calvin,” my aunt added. Again, she said this brightly. My aunt had a knack for saying insulting things in a way that made them sound like they were happy points of fact, not insults at all. “I shaved my head,” I told her, and explained that a year or so earlier I had become highly conscious of the fact that I was losing my hair and that the hair I still had was gray and that this made me look older than I was or than I wanted to be. So as a corrective I shaved my head completely and grew a beard, which, I was now admitting for the first time, even to myself, was grayer and grizzlier and patchier than the head hair had been. When I was through talking, my aunt said pleasantly, “I have never understood men.” I waited for her to say more, but no, that was apparently all she had to say on that subject, and she was ready to move on to the next one. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
3
" You can be so stupid, Calvin,” Aunt Beatrice finally said. It was the second time in as many hours that she’d called me stupid. And though she said it in her normal bright tone, I could feel and hear how much she really meant it. “Did I hurt your feelings, Calvin?” my aunt said in that same tone, her face still underneath the cloth. I admitted that she had and then waited for her to apologize. She didn’t, of course. She did remove the cloth, though, so that maybe I could better see and hear how sorry she wasn’t. “Good,” Aunt Beatrice said, and then added, “I said what I said because it was true. And because I wanted to.” Fuck you is what I wanted to say and is what I should have said because it was what I wanted to say, and that was the lesson here: say what you want to say. “Just because you say something is true,” I said instead, trying to control my voice, trying to keep the pain out of it, “and just because you say what you want, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” My aunt nodded. “If it doesn’t hurt,” she said, “then you’re not doing it right. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
5
" How’s your boy?” he said. His accent was flat, and I assumed he was from somewhere flat, too. “He’s just started writing for the pellet stove industry,” my mother said. I did notice that she said “writing” and not “blogging.” But I also noticed some color in her voice, as though she were pleased enough to be reporting this news. “He has,” this man said in his flat, flat voice. My mother gave me, as a child, an illustrated Old Testament, and in that book there is an illustration of the Garden of Eden, and in that illustration the serpent is looking menacingly at Adam and Eve with its neck flared out. Well, my mother’s neck flared like the serpent’s as she spat this quote from John Calvin at the flat-voiced minister: “There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
6
" An hour later, when the movie was over, Caroline closed her laptop, looked at me squarely, and said, “We had some good sex.” Which is more than Dawn, or John Calvin, or my mother in her famous book, ever said on the subject. 125. The sentence “We had some good sex” will make you gabby. I immediately told Caroline about my job, and my parents and their deaths, and my aunt’s appearance, and our trip, and the places we’d been and the people we’d met and the things we’d done, which included stealing the knife. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
7
" I should have been shocked to see her. But I wasn’t. After all, I’d thought, believed, that my mother was dead. I’d wanted her to be dead. And it was very much like my mother to be alive just to show me that what I had thought, believed, wanted, was wrong. “If you desperately want something,” my mother wrote in her famous book, “then that is surely proof that you don’t deserve to get what you want. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
8
" And your father?” my aunt said. “My father was a good guy,” I said. I believed this to be true. Also, this was what most people said about him. For instance, his former athletes and fellow coaches at his funeral: Roger Bledsoe was a good coach, they said, but more than that, he was a good guy. “Have you ever noticed,” my aunt said, “that whenever someone says someone else is a good guy, then no one ever wants to know anything more about it? But when someone gets called a bad guy, then that’s not enough. We want to know exactly how and why.” I had not ever noticed this. It was probably worth noticing. But I was wondering about something else. “How well did you know my father?” “Well enough,” my aunt said. “Did you know his sayings?” Aunt Beatrice smiled and said, “This isn’t my first rodeo, you know.” Her expression was fond, and far away, very much like those people at my father’s funeral, and I expected her to say that my father was a good guy, but she didn’t. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
12
" When I mentioned that—that I’d recorded what the Butcher had said to her but that I’d not gotten a chance to translate and listen to it before the phone was destroyed—I expected my aunt to be surprised by my sneakiness. Instead, she took her phone out of her pocket, fidgeted with it, then handed the phone to me. I knew, before I’d even put the thing to my ear, what it was: my aunt had recorded that particular moment with the Butcher also. Because not only does an old lady like being accompanied to the doctor’s office, but an old lady also likes to record what the doctor says to her, so difficult is it for an old lady to pay close attention to the doctor’s diagnosis at the time of its delivery, especially if the diagnosis is a bad one. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
15
" I don’t want Aunt Beatrice to die,” is what I finally said—to the waves, I thought. “Me neither,” a woman’s voice said from behind me. I turned and there was Caroline. Her blue blazer was gone, and her freckled skin looked pale against her white dress. The dress looked freckled, too—there were red flecks near the hem that I realized were spots of blood. I scrambled to my feet. “Even though your aunt has done some very bad things,” she added. “But that doesn’t make her a bad person,” I said automatically. “Of course it does, Calvin,” Caroline said, and it struck me that my aunt probably would have said the same thing. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
18
" So why are you here then?” I asked Caroline, and I felt as I had earlier, right before I’d asked Aunt Beatrice if she was my mother. It was the feeling you get when you ask a question and are afraid the answer you’re going to get is not the answer you want. “I want you to run away with me,” Caroline said, then laughed at herself for saying, or wanting, something so ridiculous. “I mean it,” she added, and I believed that she did. Anyway, that was the answer I wanted! I’d finally gotten the answer I’d wanted! And it turned out, as is true of most people and of most good things, that I was not worthy of it, that I was scared of it. “But you barely know me.” “Well, yeah,” Caroline said in a way that suggested that her barely knowing me was my most attractive quality. “Where would we go?” I asked, not really caring where, just trying to buy myself some time. Caroline shrugged, but I sensed that she knew where and that she wasn’t going to tell me because I would find some way to object to the place even though I’d surely know not one thing about it. “To do what?” I asked, and again she just shrugged. “I can’t,” I said. Caroline didn’t say anything to that, didn’t even bother to shrug, just fixed her eyes on me and kept them on me, just daring me to say something false. I realized then how she must have, in fact, been very good at her job, and that it must have cost her a great deal to give it up. "
― Brock Clarke , Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
