A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche

your grandfather. They could kill him.”
    I say not a word. My mother smiles and looks away in embarrassment. William or Sam ignores the Banker, as though she were a bad chess player who’d just advanced a useless pawn. His reply is a carefully thought out, resolute attack. A knight move. No, he says, no, he doesn’t want to kill his grandfather, but his grandfather loves potato chips, and he doesn’t think the little pleasure he derives from a few potatoes and a bit of oil and salt will kill him. My mother looks at him and smiles. Grandpa is dying of old age, he continues, because he is very old. He corrects himself: because he’s older than Grandma. She smiles again, marvelling, obviously, at the mystery of adolescence. For adults, there is no more incomprehensible period in their children’s lives than adolescence.
    Adolescents are simply older children to whom we grant certain adult liberties so we can avoid confrontations that would remind us of the fact that they are still children. I cannot, for example, imagine a teenager being fascinated by death, that death would be something he or she would dream about, obsess over. But we prematurely confer on them the status of adulthood in order to avoid having to accompany them through their anarchic discovery of life. At least until they do something unusually stupid. Unsure of our own relationship to the real world, we prefer to think that they know everything we do not, which relieves us of the duty of having to teach them anything, explain things to them or forbid them anything. Forbid—a horrible word that no modern parents can use with their children.
    Stalin and my father were true parents. They had all the answers and understood that children must remain children for as long as possible. Submissive, obedient children ease into adolescence for a troubling time, and then slide into adulthood and become good citizens without being aware of it. That’s how adolescence makes men.
    This adolescent looks up and says, simply: “I’ll be right back, Aunt Géraldine.”
    A few seconds later he’s back with two bags of chips, one barbecue and the other natural.
    “I’m Grandpa’s potato-chip pusher,” he says. “Whenever I come to see him I bring a few bags. He hides them under his bed.”
    The Banker blanches and appears to be close to having an apoplectic fit. My mother hides a smile. Sam seems pleased by the stir he is making.
    “Take a few deep breaths, Aunt Géraldine.”
    He laughs brightly, as though suddenly liberated from a great weight. She seems to have been robbed of the power of speech, she who with a wave of her hand regularly transfers tens of millions of dollars from Montreal to Zurich to the Grand Caymans to Panama, and back again by e-mail to Luxembourg. She finally rallies her thoughts.
    “You want to kill your grandfather!”
    “No, I love him as much as you do, but I want him to be happy. Shit, you never understand anything. You’re older than he is.”
    The Banker’s brows furrow threateningly and my mother tells Sam that it doesn’t matter, she knew about the chips because under the bed isn’t a particularly clever place to hide them. Sam beams.
    My sister explodes. “You, too, Mother!”
    “Of course, my dear. I know everything that goes on here because I still do all the housework and shopping. Every now and then, when he’s sleeping, I dump half a bag of chips in the garbage. I leave him a few treasures, let him have his little secrets, God knows there won’t be many more of them. And I’m glad that William lied to me in order to make his grandfather happy.”
    Disconcerted, the Banker goes on about having a sense of responsibility, which my mother also appears to lack. Sometimes you have to refrain from making someone happy no matter how hard it is. Why, just two days ago she herself was eating a gargantuan plate of sauerkraut at the Berlin, she couldn’t finish half of it, you really should go there, Mother, and she thought