The Best American Short Stories 2014 by Jennifer Egan Read Free Book Online

sleep.”
    â€œIs this the point where I try to convince you seventy isn’t old?”
    â€œI’ve got a better idea. I’m about to turn seventy-one, so why don’t you get Daddy to fly you here and we can celebrate my birthday at the same restaurant where Egil Fray shot the bottle of tequila, then offered the bartender a slice of lime as it poured down from the top shelf like a waterfall. Egil was funny.”
    Egil, back in college, had been the star student of our class: articulate; irreverent; devoted to books; interested in alcohol, bicycling, Italian cooking, UFOs, and Apple stock. He’d been diagnosed bipolar after he dove off the Delaware Memorial Bridge and broke every rib, his nose, and one wrist, and said he was sorry he’d had the idea. That was years ago, when he’d had insurance, when he was still married to Brenda, when everybody thought he was the brightest boy, including his doctors. He’d gotten good with a slingshot—none of that macho shooting the apple off the wife’s head—but he’d caused a significant amount of damage, even when taking good aim. He was finishing medical school now.
    I said, “I wonder if that’s a sincere wish.”
    â€œIt would be great,” he said, and for a second I believed him, until he filled in the details: “You’d be in your hotel room on your cell phone, and I’d be here with my man Rudy, talking to you from the Princess phone.”
    He really did have a Princess phone, and he was no more wrong about that than Egil had been about Apple. Repairmen had offered him serious money for the pale blue phone. His ex-wife (Carrie, his third, the only one I’d known) had asked for it officially, in court papers—along with half his frequent-flyer miles, from the days when he devotedly visited his mother in her Colorado nursing home.
    â€œYou know, it would be good to see you,” I said. “I can afford a ticket. What about next Monday? What are you doing then?”
    â€œGetting ready for Halloween. Looking in every drawer for my rubber fangs.”
    â€œCan’t help you there, but I could bring my Groucho glasses and mustache.”
    â€œI’ll take you to the finest new restaurant,” he said. “My favorite item on the menu is Pro and Pros. It’s a glass of prosecco and some very delicious hard cheese wrapped in prosciutto. Alcoholics don’t care about entrées.”
    â€œThen we go dancing?” (We
had
gone dancing; we had, we had, we had. Everyone knew it, and every woman envied me.)
    â€œI don’t think so, unless you just wanted to dance around the floor with me held over your head, like Mel Fisher on the floor of the ocean with his buried treasure, or a goat you’d just killed.”
    â€œYou live in Philadelphia, not Greece.”
    â€œThere is no more Greece,” he said. “They fucked themselves good.”
    Pretty soon thereafter, he had a coughing fit and my boyfriend came into the kitchen with raised eyebrows meant to ask: Are you sleeping with me tonight? And we hung up.
    Â 
    I took the train. It wasn’t difficult. I got a ride with a friend to some branch of Metro going into Washington and rode it to Union Station. Then I walked forever down the train track to a car someone finally let me on. I felt like an ant that had walked the length of a caterpillar’s body and ended up at its anus. I sat across from a mother with a small son whose head she abused any time she got bored looking out the window: swatting it with plush toys; rearranging his curls; inspecting him for nits.
    The North 34th Street station was familiar, though the photo booth was gone. We’d had our pictures taken there, a strip of them, and we’d fought over who got them, and then after I won, I lost them somehow. I went outside and splurged on a cab.
    Since his divorce, Franklin had lived in a big stone building with a curving driveway. At