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    Allegory of a Cave
    Allegory of a Cave
    Allegory of a Cave
    Ebook47 pages38 minutes

    Allegory of a Cave

    By Holly Goddard Jones

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    About this ebook

    In Girl Trouble, acclaimed writer Holly Goddard Jones examines small-town Southerners aching to be good, even as they live in doubt about what goodness is.

    A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant--with his child. A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.

    In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

    Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, Jones's stories shed light on the darkness of the human condition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9780061966378
    Allegory of a Cave
    Author

    Holly Goddard Jones

    Holly Goddard Jones's stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best American Mystery Stories, and various literary journals. She is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

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      Book preview

      Allegory of a Cave - Holly Goddard Jones

      Allegory of a Cave

      a story from Girl Trouble

      Holly Goddard Jones

      logo.jpg

      For Brandon and my father:

      two good men

      Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

      —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

      • Contents •

      Cover Page

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Allegory of a Cave

      About the Author

      Acknowledgments

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      • Allegory of a Cave •

      Ben’s father was a truck driver. He was gone as often as he was home, so Ben’s mother conducted herself for most of the days in the week like a single parent, suffering no foolishness. She worked in the cafeteria at the middle school, where Ben was in the sixth grade. She’d rise at five a.m., bathe and dress in about fifteen minutes, drink a couple of cups of coffee, black and sugarless, and kiss Ben on the forehead at exactly five-thirty, breath sour. Up and Adam, she’d say, or that’s what Ben heard, anyhow, and by the time he’d fumbled for his glasses and pressed his bare feet against the cold hardwood floor, she was gone. She didn’t have a car or even a driver’s license, and so she had to walk the two miles between their home and school, getting there in plenty of time to start the breakfast line for the poor kids. Ben took the school bus.

      There were plenty of reasons why he loved his mother, but this was one of them: At lunch, on the days when she was put on the register, standing at the end of the buffet with her apron and her hairnet and her white pantyhose, she didn’t so much as acknowledge him. She would collect the forty cents she’d left that morning on his nightstand, glance at his lunch card, and instruct him to keep it down like everybody else. She saved her razzing for the end of the day, back at home. Who’s that girl you were sitting with at lunch, lady-killer? Or, "If I see you walk through that line again with nothing but French fries, you’ll be sorry, buddy." She didn’t cook during the week, when Ben’s father was away—she said she did enough of that at the school—and so they feasted together most nights on frozen pizzas and peanut butter sandwiches, or they’d walk to McDonald’s on quarter-hamburger day, eat as much as they could stuff in, and take home an extra bagful to freeze for later. They were both tall and rail-thin; they could eat whatever they wanted and not gain a pound. She also smoked. Ben knew this; his father supposedly did not. When his father called from Nashville to announce that he was on his way back to Roma, his mother would wink at Ben, stash her carton of Camels in Ben’s closet, and clean out every ashtray in the house. Ben liked that she trusted him.

      His father was, as fathers tend to be, another case. Ben loved him, of course. But it wasn’t an easy or effortless love, and Ben felt a guilty relief whenever his father’s Buick Regal backed out of the gravel drive on Sunday afternoons, Nashville-bound. The man had four modes: absent—and this Ben could depend upon, at least four or five

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