God and Jetfire by Amy Seek Read Free Book Online

not to fall, when a skier came out of nowhere saying sorry, sorry, sorry beneath me as we all three slid down the hill. Someone who demanded pickles, just like on TV.
    And someone who joined us for a last hike in the mountains, where Dad did what he always did out in the woods. He’d wander off the trail, studying one tree after another, from top to bottom. He’d press at a trunk inquisitively. When he found a good one, he’d press more until the tree began to move almost imperceptibly back and forth, and at that same tiny rhythm he’d push back. Soon the top of the tree would be whipping in large arcs, knocking through the canopy, and it would start to crack a few feet above where it met the ground. We were so used to him doing it, we didn’t even turn around when we heard it fall, but sometimes we’d chop it up and roll it down the mountain for firewood.
    â€œJust a lovely day, isn’t it?” he asked me. It was sunny and not cold at all, though colder on the mountaintop than back at home. I told him about my internship that was coming up in January. My program consisted of alternating internship quarters and quarters in school, year-round for six years. Kids went all over the world for their internships, but I’d found a job in Cincinnati so I could be with Jevn, who would be in school. We’d made that plan before I got pregnant.
    Dad liked to hear about architecture school. Architects’ ignorance about construction made his engineering work more challenging, but he was amused by stories about this ignorance in its earliest stages of development. And he was always willing to help with my structures assignments. Design a column to be crushed, a bridge to be broken. You know a material best by knowing how it breaks.
    â€œI was thinking,” he said, “it was nice with your mother and me, that when we had you kiddies she could take off from teaching, and I could work on making the money. And that we’d done all the traveling we wanted to do beforehand. I’d think it would be awfully hard to be a single mother—”
    â€œI know , Dad.” I stopped him from nearing the subject, in his indirect way. “That’s what we already decided. I’m doing adoption.”
    And we had already established that hard and easy didn’t matter. It wasn’t about how it felt. It was about the facts, that a child needs certain things I couldn’t give it. It was up to me to manage the emotional part.
    He went silent and cracked some peanuts out of his pocket, offering one to me. He stepped off to the side and pressed at another trunk. Looked up the column to its leafless top. All that weight seemed weightless when it was woven within the other branches, reaching to the sky.
    â€œWhat is it that makes it fall?” I asked.
    â€œOh, oh. Well. It’s called resonance. Just the particular frequency of a material where it has a bigger amplitude.” He waved his hand back and forth, imitating the tree. “When you apply pressure at a certain rhythm, a small amount of force can generate a whole lot of oscillation.” His hand waved in bigger arcs. “Enough oscillation, and the material fails. It’s in everything’s nature to break. You just have to find the right force.” He pressed a few more times until there was a splintering, shifting deep inside the trunk. He looked at me and smiled, raising and wiggling his eyebrows. He scrambled backward as the tree came crashing down.

 
    SIX
    Molly brought a small stack of colorful packets into the room and sat down. Some were almost books, their cardstock covers bound with lace ribbons, and some were just a few pages stapled at the corner. There were beaming faces on the front pages, ecstatic fonts and cute margin art. “Hi! We’re Rob and Robin!!” they cried out from some strange and wonderful place, out of cozy windows where fuzzy felt shutters were stuck to fuzzy felt