An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

No matter how old you are, you are always a step behind the two people who made you, the two people who always know something that you need to know, too — like, for instance, how my mother had known that Anne Marie had kicked me out of the house, or even that there was an Anne Marie, or a house.
    “Last night you said that my wife had kicked me out of the house,” I said. “How did you know that?”
    “What?” my mother said loudly, because my father had begun drinking the beer, slurping it heroically and at top volume, and I had to shout the question — “How did you know that my wife had kicked me out?” — so she could hear it over the soggy racket of my father’s imbibing.
    “Oh, Sam,” my mother said, “it’s an old story.”
    “An old story,” I repeated, thinking now of what the judge had said to me at my sentencing about good stories and bad stories, and for the first time in years I recognized that stories were everywhere and all-important. There were all those letters stashed away in the shoe box, all those people who wanted me to burn down those writers’ homes because of the stories the writers had told; there was the story that Thomas Coleman told Anne Marie that made her kick me out; there were stories that the bond analysts had told about themselves in their memoirs, if they’d even written them (one had, sort of, but I didn’t know that yet); and there were my mother’s stories, which everyone knows all about, and suddenly I knew the answer to the judge’s question, or at least half the answer. Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn’t?
    But what was the direct effect? That, I didn’t know, didn’t know the stories — new or old — well enough to know what effect they might have. But my mother did, that was clear, and I hated her for it, hated her on top of already hating her for what her stories had done to me, hated her for knowing something that I didn’t and for making me feel powerless because of it, and maybe this is also what it means to be a child: always needing your parents and hating them for it, but still needing them, and maybe needing to hate them, too, and probably that was an old story as well.
    “An old story,” I said again, and then in a rush reminded my mother about the judge, what he’d said so many years before about stories and what they could and could not do, and how I still didn’t know and needed to: because if my wife’s kicking me out was an old story, then her taking me back (or not, or not!) was also an old story, and I needed to know it. Would my mother help me? “It’s important,” I said. “Please.” I was even prepared to grovel and cry a little, too, and then also prepared to hate her for making me grovel and cry.
    “You’re talking to the wrong woman,” my mother said. “I’m through with books. I’m through with stories of any kind.”
    “You are?” I said. This was big news, all right. I couldn’t imagine my mother without her stories, stories that had meant so much to her that she’d had to force them on me. It was like imagining a musketeer without his sword or musket or the other musketeers — just one unarmed Frenchman, alone with his fancy mustache and his feathered hat and his foppishness. Then I looked around and noticed what I’d already noticed the day before: there were no books anywhere. “What happened to your books?” I asked her.
    “I got rid of them,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “Why?” she said. Here her voice got sharp, her face got sharp, too, and I could see my new mother, Beth, revert to the old mother, Elizabeth; it was like watching the presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore morph back into the big rock they once were. “Do you want to know why?”
    “I do,” I said, because I did.
    My mother looked at me for a long time, and as she did, her face got kindly again. You could see pity, love, and pain filling her up, rising from her toes, through the