The Answer to Everything

The Answer to Everything by Elyse Friedman Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: The Answer to Everything by Elyse Friedman Read Free Book Online
Authors: Elyse Friedman
don’t do anything anymore, let alone write to strangers. Funny how you can go from someone who does a million things—job, mom, Community Crafters Club, Dragon Boat Festival Committee—to someone who does nothing. Yesterday I went for a walk. It was the first time I’ve been past the property line since I moved here. I get my groceries delivered. There’s a good service for that. And my prescriptions and anything else I need. My sister used to visit every couple of months. But that’s ended. I don’t care. She has no idea. She thinks she does, but she doesn’t. And her visits exhaust me. I don’t have the energy for her silence or her sighs. For her bright blouses and her disapproval. Just thinking of her sitting in the corner with her white pants and her orange pedicure makes me tired. I like it dark and quiet down here. Nobody blazing in the corner, thank you very much. This is the only place I can imagine living now. Underground. Like a mole. I have mushrooms growing between the tile cracks in my shower. The only mushrooms around here. I don’t cook anymore. I used to cook every day. I used to make all these sneaky recipes because my baby didn’t like vegetables. I had to be clever about it. Hide things inside pasta noodles and coverthem with cheese sauce. Roll a broccoli floret in a piece of pepperoni, roll that in cheese, cover it in pizza dough and bake. I was good at it. I made muffins that were full of zucchini, but nobody could tell. Those muffins were a big hit. Now all my food is frozen.
    The people upstairs have no idea that I used to be normal. Sometimes I see them in the laundry area or the backyard and I can tell what they’re thinking. But I don’t care. I couldn’t care less what I look like. They are in a different world than I am. I used to be in that world, and I had no idea there was anything outside it. That has been a real eye-opener—to discover that there is a dark underworld going at the same time as the regular sunlit world. Everything was so normal for so long. When I was growing up, I can’t think of one un-normal thing that ever happened. There was a girl in my sister’s class at Canadore who got paralyzed in a car crash. But that didn’t happen to me. And it’s pretty normal for a teenager to get into a car accident, especially around North Bay, with all the moose on the highway. They like the salt on the roads. That girl’s boyfriend hit a moose on Highway 11. The boyfriend wasn’t hurt at all. Some people get paralyzed and some walk away without a scratch.
    My husband was super-normal. Paul Bauer. A home inspector. A coach at the summer hockey camp for kids. A large man. Handy. He liked his beer and his sports and his workshop. I liked the way he looked and that he could do everything well. He could rewire a house, build a deck, fix his own truck and drive anywhere and back without looking at a map, let alone one of those GPS devices that he used to scoff at. He never went to the doctor, never got sick. I liked how hewould pick me up and carry me around and call me “Feather” instead of Heather. Sometimes strangers would think he was my dad because he was so big and mature-looking; he always looked like a grown-up, even in high school, and I was always such a shrimp and kept looking like a teenager even into my thirties. I liked the grandfather clocks he used to make in the workshop and sell at cost to our friends. He was the best home inspector around. Everyone wanted Paul Bauer. He never missed a thing. He really cared about doing everything correctly. He had integrity. He had a jean jacket that smelled a little like tobacco from the one cigarette he enjoyed in the yard every night after dinner. I loved that smell. Snow and smoke.
    Gosh, this is strange. It’s making me remember a time before hate. I don’t feel it, but I can remember it. I need to sleep now. Maybe I’ll finish this later.
Keith
    To whom it may concern,
    When I was fourteen, I forgot to let the dog

Similar Books

The Exiled

Christopher Charles

Missing

Becky Citra

Man Up!

Ross Mathews

The Makeover

Vacirca Vaughn

Blurred Lines

Tamsyn Bester

Concerto to the Memory of an Angel

Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

After Dakota

Kevin Sharp

Double Clutch

Liz Reinhardt