The Grand Tour by Adam O'Fallon Price Read Free Book Online

the university a month ago and instead filtered them directly into his spam folder. He didn’t know how it had all happened; it wasn’t as though he’d decided to drop out of school, he just hadn’t been able to bring himself to go; and as the weeks went by, instead of deciding to quit or not quit, he’d opted to simply ignore it as long as possible and hope it would go away.
    As a matter of course, he looked for a letter from his father, though he knew one wouldn’t be there. Not a card for his nineteenth birthday two months previous, not a letter informing them of his whereabouts, and certainly not any of the many thousands in back child support he owed. He’d stopped paying years before, although the small stream of money they were meant to get had, from the outset, come in as a grudging, anemic trickle. When he was sixteen, in a fit of irate curiosity, Vance had spent $29.99 he couldn’t afford for a membership on internetsleuth.com, a supremely dodgy website that purported to locate a Steven Marcus Allerby in Queens, New York. Mapquest pinpointed the address in the middle of a neighborhood named Sunnyside. The name, and its ominous cheer, had lodged themselves in Vance’s head—he assumed it had to be ironic and imagined his hapless father living in a shuttered tenement that permitted no light whatsoever. The address had lodged itself in his wallet, on a folded slip of paper he kept meaning to throw away.
    Through the window behind the table, his car sat in the driveway, gray in the moonlight. During his childhood, a succession of cars had sat where his sat now, usually in various states of repair and disrepair, surrounded by sheets of newspaper on which rested oily bolts and obscure engine segments, like patients at some fly-by-night clinic with their guts out. On the rare occasions when his father found employment, it was as an unlicensed auto mechanic and detailer; he’d escaped, six years ago, in a ’68 Ford Falcon he’d spent months with, neglecting his family in favor of restoring it. Vance had helped load up the car, laden with all of Steve’s possessions like a pioneer-era dray horse, knock-kneed under saddlebags. This was the swan song in a series of attempts his mother and father had made at reconciliation that went back as far as Vance could remember. As now, his mother had been upstairs in her room.
    “Where are you going,” he’d asked, setting a lamp shaped like a steam engine on the front seat.
    “Anywhere else.”
    “Why?”
    “So I don’t kill your mother, and so she doesn’t kill me.”
    “Take me with you.”
    His father had started the car and looked at him with real tenderness—not a look that very often crossed Steve Allerby’s face—and said, “I’ll be back real soon, okay?” Then he threw the car into gear and, in his rush to get away, bottomed out at the end of the drive, scraping a trail of sparks. He had not been back, real soon or otherwise.
    Vance tossed a few envelopes in the reeking trash, then went downstairs and surveyed his domain. Ever since his brother, John, had joined the army, nearly three years earlier, Vance had had the entire downstairs to himself. Two bedrooms and the larger den area, although it was really all one space and resembled some hayseed branch library gone to hell. There were stacks of books everywhere—on the few shelves but also leaning against the wall in unsteady towers, not to mention strewn everywhere on the floor. There were books in boxes and books in bags and books clustered in piles for which he had long since forgotten the grouping logic, if, in fact, there ever had been any—the cadaverous Irish existentialist balanced on top of Brazilian sci-fi which in turn sat on an obese leather-bound anthology entitled
An Illustrated History of Good Reading.
Over the years, he had spent his meager disposable income on books and not much else. He was a familiar figure at local library sales, estate sales, and Salvation Army giveaway bins