The Carnival at Bray by Jessie Ann Foley Read Free Book Online

of the night driving around the city so he could teach her the grid system. AG BULLT rumbled up and down the length and breadth of Chicago as Kevin pointed at street signs and barked out their coordinates: “Western Avenue, 2400 West! Kedzie Avenue, 3200 West! Belmont Avenue, 3200 North!” Up and down and up and down they went as the Clash blasted from the beleaguered speakers and the cheeseburgers dwindled.
    â€œWhen a city has a grid system and you take the time to learn it, it’s impossible to get lost,” he explained. “But Ireland is old and mountainous, and it’s probably going to be a bitch to find your way around there. Before you go, I’ll give you the compass I have left over from my Cub Scout days. For a Magellan like you, it might be your only hope. Now: Division Avenue is located at what-hundred north?”
    â€œ1200!” Maggie shouted. “Wait a second—did you just say you were a
Boy Scout?”
    â€œNo, I said I was a
Cub
Scout,” he said, tossing a cheeseburger wrapper out the window. “I quit before attaining the level of actual Boy Scout. And you can laugh all you want, but there’s only one person in this car who knows Morse code, and it certainly ain’t you.”
    Maggie reached into her jacket pocket now and held the scratched little brass compass. It was nearly twenty years old, and when Kevin had fished it out of the recesses of his closet, they’d discovered that it no longer worked. But she’d brought it with her to Ireland anyway. She didn’t know why. She guessed maybe because it was one of the only gifts Kevin had ever given her, and just having it in her pocket, holding its cool, round weight in her palm, always made her feel less lost. She was still angry at her mom for locking him out of the going-away party and denying her a chance to say good-bye, but in the course of three months the anger had calcified into a dull, throbbing resentment—a resentment that was only part of a larger anger at her mom’s flightiness and immaturity, for the way heartbreak never seemed to teach her anything, for the way her search for romance was always disrupting their lives. For their part, Laura and Kevin, like many brothers and sisters, could forgive each other as quickly and easily as they condemned each other, and both seemed to have forgotten about the incident at Oinker’s. He called the house fairly regularly, and Maggie had talked to him about once a month since they’d arrived in Bray. The last time they’d spoken, Nirvana had just announced its European tour dates, and Kevin frothed with excitement about the prospect of the band from Seattle tearing their way through the staid cities of Western Europe.
    â€œMaggie,” he said, his voice shrill and trembling, “if you ever listen to my advice on
anything,
listen to me about this, okay? You. Must. Go. See. Nirvana. In. Rome. It’s a two-hour flight from Dublin, and it’s at the Palaghiaccio di Marino, and it’s going to be transcendent.”
    â€œYou know I’m sixteen, right?” Maggie said. “Mom would never in a million years let me go to Italy for a Nirvana show!
Maybe
she’d take me to see them in Dublin. But Rome? No way.”
    â€œFirst of all, what are you talking about?” He was yelling now. “You can’t go see Nirvana with your
mother.
Second of all,did you hear what I said? Rome! The Eternal City! Julius Caesar! Crossing the Rubicon! The Coliseum! It’s like, the giants of the present colliding with the giants of the past. It’s like two thousand years of civilization coming full circle. Can you imagine Kurt Cobain’s voice drifting across the fucking Tiber? Echoing off the goddam piazzas?” On the other end of the phone, she could hear him plucking compulsively at the strings of his guitar. “Don’t you understand, Maggie? This would be like
President fucking CLINTON
playing