Crossing the Bridge by Michael Baron Read Free Book Online

in the car, she looked up at me. For a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me again. Then she just said, “It’s late . . . my mother,” and started the car.
    “I’ll be in the store the entire day,” I said to her behind her closed window. “Call me before you go.”
    “I will,” she said, backing her car out of the space and leaving the parking lot.
    I stood in the same place, as though planted there by that kiss, until she drove away. Then, instead of getting into my own car, I went back into the bar and ordered some coffee. I wasn’t ready to drive just yet.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Everything That’s Between Us and All
    I slept later than I intended the next morning, and when I went down to make myself something for breakfast, my mother had already gone to the hospital. An unopened box of Honey Nut Cheerios – which I ate practically every morning while I was still living at home – sat on the counter. I hadn’t eaten them in years, but my mother couldn’t have known that. I threw a couple of slices of bread in the toaster and poured myself a cup of coffee while I waited.
    I hadn’t been completely alone in the house in nearly ten years. For some reason, I felt that I should take the opportunity to examine things more closely, the whole-place equivalent of checking out the medicine cabinet. I walked into the den, sat in my father’s recliner, and looked around the room. There was a book on the coffee table that they’d brought back from a trip to the Grand Canyon a few years before. There was a photo of my mother standing uncomfortably (the only way she ever posed for pictures) next to her goddaughter Lisa on the weekend of Lisa’s wedding. The Raku vase I’d given them for their thirtieth anniversary sat on a shelf next to the
television, at complete odds with all of the other adornments in the room. And the old tapestry throw pillows had been replaced by a set of navy velour ones. Other than that, the room looked exactly as it did before I moved out. They still had Chase’s lacrosse trophies lined up on one bookshelf. The set of ceramic candlesticks he’d made in seventh grade and given to my mother for Christmas sat next to my vase. My parents’ wedding picture was on one side of the fireplace and the photograph of them renewing their vows twenty years later was on the other. The frames with our high school photos hung on another wall. I suppose when you’ve been living in the same house for as long as my parents have, you stop thinking about making changes.
    I heard the bread pop up in the toaster and returned to the kitchen. The local daily paper, the Amber Advisor , sat on the kitchen table and I absently perused the front page while I ate. There might have been unrest all over the globe, a crippling political scandal in Washington, or a life altering scientific breakthrough commanding the headlines of the New York Times or the Boston Globe . But the Advisor reserved the space above the fold for matters of traffic lights, Amber High’s SAT scores, and the visit of a Lithuanian folk musician to the Community Center.
    Just as they’d reserved it ten years earlier for the report of an accident on the Pine River Bridge that had claimed the life of the eighteen-year-old son of a prominent Amber shopkeeper. I hadn’t read the paper that morning, in fact didn’t remember seeing any newspaper in the house for several days after the accident. But just before I’d left town, I’d found
the issue with the story sitting on top of a pile of other “commemorative newspapers” on my aunt’s bookshelf. I’d frozen at the sight and then walked away without reading more than the headline.
    After I finished eating, I headed to the store. A college-age woman stood behind the counter reading a copy of Entertainment Weekly . She didn’t look up when I entered and I think I could have taken the entire front display of stuffed toys out the door without her noticing. Only when I walked behind the counter did she