The Constant Heart by Craig Nova Read Free Book Online Page B

left with a heavy, small triangle, just like the ones she had thrown up to the window of the women’s prison. Then the bus came and I climbed the steps through the cloud of exhaust that swept up from the rattling exhaust pipe.

T HEN , ONE MORNING, as though my father had gotten through a moment of profound confusion, he came into the kitchen and kissed my mother on the cheeck and she seemed so glad to have him do that. She said, “Well, Romeo, what’s gotten into you this morning?” as though it was a joke that he already knew the punch line to. He sat down and whistled, “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’, oh, what a beautiful day . . . ”
    A letter from Sara came a week later, and it said, “You know, they must think I’m dim or something here because the first thing I did was run a pencil back and forth on the first page of the notebook, where I could see an indentation, like someone had written something on the first page but it had been torn out. And they left the little lacy stuff in the spiral part of the notebook when you tear a sheet out. So I got your message. Sweetheart. We should have been more honest. And, get this, Mr. Junior Astronomer, how about unintended consequence? Now that I’m in here, I can see something I didn’t really understand before. You were always curious about that
Constant thing. You know, Einstein’s attempt to make something work. Well, how did that come out? Sara.”
    The letter was on stationery that was so thin you could almost see through it. The return address was her name, the address of the place, and a number, too. That number would have made Mrs. Kilmer happy.
    I wrote back and said that I didn’t know about the Constant, not yet. And after a few weeks, she wrote back to say, “Well, Jake, do me a favor. Find out, will you? It would be nice to have something to depend on.”
    Then I put the next letter I wrote in an envelope with her number on it, too, in addition to her name.
    I worked through the calculus books I stole from the bookstore, and then began with integral equations. I liked calculus because it showed how one thing was related to another.
    Sara’s letter arrived, and my father brought it in and put it on the graph paper where I was working out a problem, and he didn’t say a word, not about the handwriting, which was done so carefully as to seem awkward, since you could see the line she had drawn to make the letters straight and hadn’t been able to erase, although you could see she had tried. And he didn’t say anything about the number.
    â€œWell, you let me know when you find out what that Constant thing really means,” she wrote. “And get this. Now my mother writes to me.” Some spots were here and there where some moisture had gotten on the paper and had dried. They left a little wrinkle. “But Jake, you’re the only one who ever kept his word to me. I asked for help. You gave it. Or you and your father. So, good luck, Mr. Junior Astronomer. Everyone in this place reads the National Enquirer , Star , Globe ,
and the National Examiner . I’m going to get out of here and get famous. Do you know how much money there is in being famous? How about a screenplay? I’ve got a killer idea. I’m going to make you proud. Sara.”

T HE MIDDLE FORTIES and early fifties are a hard time for a man, although I didn’t know that at the time. When Sara got arrested, my father was a wildlife biologist, as I’ve said, and he worked for the state. There were things he knew that no one else did, particularly about certain birds, such as ruffed grouse, and fish, too, such as brook trout. He had done a paper on bears and what seemed like their random attacks. A lot of it had to do with garbage that the bears ate and how doing this made them lose their fear of people. He also found that the smoke from burning trash when there was food in it seemed to make them very