MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin Read Free Book Online

hands it to O’Neil. “She sounds like a lovely girl,” Miriam says.
    “It’s true,” O’Neil says, and laughs at himself. “God knows what she sees in me.”
    They each have two drinks before they are seated at a table and order dinner. The hour is just nine, but already O’Neil is yawning. Every time this happens he apologizes and makes a joke about how they’re not really boring him, it’s just the running, all the workouts this past week for tomorrow’s race.
    “You don’t really have to come,” he says, smearing a piece of bread with cheese from a crock on the middle of the table. “We’re going to get hammered, anyway. We’re completely overtrained. You should go to the field hockey game instead. Sandra’s just JV, but those girls are really
good
.”
    The food is so bad it’s actually funny—everything overcooked and drenched with heavy sauce—and in the end, O’Neil eats most of what’s on his parents’ plates in addition to his own. An amazing performance: he caps off the meal with a slab of chocolate pie while Arthur and Miriam share a pot of watery tea. They offer to drive him back to his dormitory, but in the lobby he changes his mind; the walk will do him good, he says, to help him digest all of it before the race, which is at one o’clock the next afternoon. Arthur goes up to their room and returns with a hat and scarf, to keep him warm on the walk home.
    “I meant what I said,” O’Neil reminds them, winding the scarf around his throat. “You really don’t have to come. There’s not much to see even if we do okay. You’ll be pretty much just waiting around to watch me drag up the rear.”
    “We’re here to be with you,” Miriam says. She steps up and hugs him, quickly. “There’s no way we’re missing it.”
    From the doorway they watch him trot down the walk, head hunched down against the cold, not looking back.
    “He’s probably going to see her,” Miriam says.
    “Wouldn’t anybody?” Arthur asks. “You saw that picture.” He gives a little admiring whistle. “Holy moly.”
    A silence falls over them. Miriam hugs herself against the cold air moving through the open door. It is certainly cold enough to snow; under the lights of the hotel Arthur can see shimmering puddles of ice just beginning to form on the flagstone walkway. Finally she says, “I’m sorry.”
    “What for?”
    “This morning.” She shrugs. “In the car. All of it. I’m not being a good sport, am I?”
    “You’re the mom. You love your kids. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
    Upstairs, Arthur showers and puts on his pajamas, then sits in darkness on the edge of their bed. He feels a slight movement under the covers and turns to see that Miriam is laughing.
    “What’s so funny?”
    It takes her a moment to speak. “Your
face,
” she manages. “When you looked at that picture. You should have seen yourself.” She rises on the pillows and touches his arm to reassure him. “I’m sorry, Art. It was just so funny.”
    Arthur climbs under the covers beside her. “She is pretty,” Arthur says. “You know, I think she reminded me of you.”
    “No, she didn’t,” Miriam says. She turns and puts her arms around him. “You’re very sweet, but you don’t have to say that.”
    “Nothing sweet about it,” Arthur says. He kisses her, and feels sleep coming. “It’s true.”
     
    Arthur and Miriam, out of town: they awaken late, eat a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls in the hotel lobby, then set out on foot to the campus to find O’Neil. It is nearly eleven; the day is bright and icy cold. Overnight, a mass of clear arctic air has moved in, and the effect is vaguely kaleidoscopic, all the colors and shapes of the town and campus at once less than real and somehow more. Above the college’s stone entranceway a banner says, Welcome Parents, and beneath the bare trees and blue, blue sky, the wide lawn of the college’s main quadrangle floats like a plate of ice.
    They arrive