All Our Yesterdays by Robert B. Parker Read Free Book Online

saturated that they flattened softly against the window, making no sound.
    “And you’re obsessed?” Grace said finally.
    “With you,” I said. “Or I have been. It runs in the family.”
    “Not love?”
    “Sure, love too, that’s what makes it tricky. To separate out the obsession and the love. And keep one, and deep-six the other.”
    “And you’ve been able to do that?”
    “Yes.” I smiled at her. “It’s my turn. One Sheridan a century.”
    “Could you describe the obsession a little for me?”
    “I was in love with love,” I said.
    “Rather than with me.”
    “Yes.”
    “Which is to say you used me to fulfill yourself.”
    “Yes.”
    Grace thought about it, her face serious and beautiful, with the first hints of maturation showing in the laugh lines around her mouth. The white sweater was wide at the neck and I could see the definition of her trapezius muscles. Most women had none, and their necks and shoulders always looked a little angular to me. I knew she’d be even better looking when she was older.
    “That seems a better deal for you than for me.”
    “Yeah, it was, in the sense that I had to have it. But it was also like the myth about the guy up to his neck in water who was dying of thirst but couldn’t drink because when he did the water dipped out of reach.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning I couldn’t get you to love … no, not love … I couldn’t get you to enter the obsession.”
    “I’d have disappeared,” Grace said.
    “Yeah, but the obsession would have been complete,” I said.
    She smiled.
    “How nice for you,” she said. “And you’re not obsessed anymore.”
    “No. Now I love you.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    I took in some air slowly, and let it out, and felt all right.
    “Because I can leave you,” I said.
    “Do you plan to?”
    “No. I plan to let you see me and where I come from and who I’ve become and ask you to marry me. If you can’t, then I’ll be sorry, and I’ll say good-bye and find someone who can marry me.”
    “Would you really?” she said. Her eyes seemed bigger than they had been and there was a sense of kinesis behind her calm face.
    “I love you. I’d miss you for a while. But, yes, I will.”
    “And you can live with that?” Grace said.
    “After last fall, I can live with anything,” I said. “Happily and well.”

Conn
    T he gray granite walls of Kilmainham jail were six feet thick. The windows narrowed like gunports and were placed so high that at six feet two inches, Conn could just reach the window ledge with his fingertips. Gas jets sputtered feebly, flaring occasionally and falling back so that the flame was barely a blue glimmer above the nozzle. The door to his cell was iron, with a small peephole in it. Through the peephole Conn could see the length of cells on the other side of the corridor. A stench came from the rarely flushed jacks, out of his vision, at the far end. Men who had to use it were escorted by a military policeman from a Welsh regiment. He carried his revolver in his hand as he walked them there and back. The stone chill of the jail was penetrating, and Conn was cold all the time. There were some dirty army blankets in a pile on the floor, but they were inadequate. Everything was inadequate to the impersonal weight of the British Empire. Beneath this vast pile of disinterested stone, Conn was a buried fleck of rubble in the blank cell where Hadley had put him.
    His first night Conn slept badly, shivering on the floor among the blankets. In the morning a prison orderly came down the corridor yelling, “Burgoo up, burgoo.” Conn got a cup of thick soupish tea and a chunk of bread. Later he was taken to the yard. It was narrow, with high walls, broken by very small barredwindows where occasionally featureless faces looked out from cells indistinguishable from Conn’s. The underfooting was gravel with occasional patches of weedy grass breaking through. The other prisoners walked with him, single file