Carry the One by Carol Anshaw Read Free Book Online Page A

not a situation conducive to relaxed conversation. The family locked into a somber mood for these visits. For her part, Olivia never seemed particularly happy to see them, only relieved that they had come, that she hadn’t been forsaken. Once they were here, she could relax and give them desultory attention during their visit.
    “A decent night’s sleep is hard to come by in here,” she said. “Half these women are crazy in addition to being criminals. They need to tell everybody about whatever’s pissing them off. Even if you can get to sleep in the middle of all the crap that goes on in here, you only have until three or four before the maniacs start babbling and the depressives start moaning. And well, by four, it’s all over for me anyway because I have to go down and start mixing up the egg powder. Breakfast is at five. Meals in here are basically just another punishment thing.”
    Near the end of the visiting hour, the family always left Nick and Olivia alone, to give them a little privacy, although neither of them had ever asked for this.
    “You don’t have to keep coming up here,” she said.
    “I was in the neighborhood.”
    “We don’t have any real connection. Not really.”
    “I’m almost done stripping the dining room set. When I’m finished, I’m just going to oil it. No varnish.”
    “I forgot to ask Mama for more paper.” This was for her book on what Jesus really meant to communicate to the world. Nick didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t want to talk about the apartment he was fixing up for them. She wasn’t interested. That was okay. In here, he figured she could go ahead and be bored with him and his plans. When she got out—with luck, next year—she would have a clearer picture of her options. And by then he would have something solid to offer. What he was doing now was feathering the nest. The apartment was in a six-flat in Rogers Park; he got reduced rent for serving as the building handyman. He was buying up old furniture and refinishing it. He was trying to pull his lifestyle more in line with hers. He moderated his drug use. He wanted to keep his habits manageable, small quiet vices he would be able to shed when she got out.
    “And Bic pens. They get stolen. They’re a big deal in here. Everybody has something they want to write down about why they don’t belong in here.” She took a closer look at him. “You should wear a hat in the sun. Your face is starting to look like a dried apple.”
    “Thanks,” Nick said, and laughed. He took this criticism as a sign of affection. “I’ll get myself a flowered sun hat. That’ll go down real well with the guys on the job. I won’t take any shit about that.”
    This pushed Olivia to a weak smile, and she reached across the table to pat his hand before getting up to leave. Her touch unfurled inside Nick’s head, and immediately seemed cause for a small celebration.
    He waited in his car in the parking lot by the lake, eating Raisinets, tapping them out of the box one at a time. He clicked an Earth, Wind & Fire cassette into the tape deck. Most of the music he liked had happened during his adolescence. Great stuff and he was sticking with it.
    He opened a folder of radio images someone sent Bernie from the dish at Arecibo. An event horizon, signaling a black hole beyond it. Nick and Bernie had been looking at this data for a while. He pulled an equation up in his head:
z(r)=sqrt(R3 / 2M) [sqrt(1 - (1 - (2Mr2 / R3)))] for r <= R
    then,
z(r)=sqrt(R3 / 2M) [sqrt(1 - (1 - (2M / R)))] +
sqrt(8M (r - 2M)) - sqrt(8m (R - 2M)) for r >= R
    He and Bernie collaborated even though Nick was no longer enrolled as a student. The whole school gestalt had gotten to be problematic. There was a casual quality to his attendance that burned the administration. In general, Nick was not terribly interested in showing up anywhere on a regular basis. He and the academic establishment differed on the importance of this.
    The daytime population of