You Are My Only by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online Page B

tomorrow?”
    â€œI will.”
    Save the Cather for me, I want to say. Save Harvey. Save Minxy. And the moon is higher and his window goes hollow and I am left alone and lonesome. In most every house we’ve ever come to, the people who have lived ahead of us have left something behind. Maybe the kitchen table, for being too small, or the lamps, for being so ugly, or a painting, because it’s a reminder of something it might be good to forget. We’re takers, Mother and I, moving the left-behinds on—the birdcage nobody wanted, the picture frames that got abandoned, the painted dresser, the collection of knobs. “What will we do with the knobs?” I said. “They’ll find their purpose,” Mother told me. Renting is for people like us, Mother says. For collectors, for carrying forward.
    The last people to live in this house left in a hurry. Left the stains still on the linoleum floor, the curtains still hanging, the shoe boxes toppled in the hallway closet. In the pantry they left cans of tomatoes, and rice. In the living room they left a torn-cushion rocker. They left drawings by little kids and a bag of blue marbles, a collection of dried ladybug wings, set out like beads. “We’ll get to it,” my mother said, but everything is still like it was—our things squeezed between their things, the library books in their tower, the boxes we carry from house to house stacked up in the closets or the basement.
    â€œI’ll make it up to you,” I said. I promised, and I mean to, lying here on my borrowed bed, flipping through library pages on the genius of solids. It’s Kepler I keep coming back to, Kepler, who makes me remember my mother’s sighing smile, and the more I index back to Kepler, the more I’m sure: I will write my ode to him, which has to be better than writing five pages on an icosahedron—has to be. “From Nothing to Big Things” I’ll call it, starting with Kepler’s poor and sickly birth and heading straight through his laws of planetary motion, his honoring of the pinhole camera, his optics and the words he used to explain the moon and its pull on the tides. I can see, the more I read, why my mother was sighing over Kepler, his work on the Archimedean solids being pretty much the least of his greatness. “From Nothing to Big Things.” I write the title in fancy script across the top of the page and then I sit here and think. It is dark down the hall and down the stairs. Dark straight up to the high half-moon. My mother snores like a train coming through.
Emmy

    Up a cut of curb, Arlen angles. Past the window streak of the old diner, beneath a sign for Kodachrome, down. We reach the west edge of the university, and Arlen pedals through—past the first of the early risers, a dog that doesn’t mind us. The station lies east in a haze, beneath a fidget of shadows, and the streets grow wider than they were before, less still and undercover. Cars drive by, and people pass. An old man with a dog. A lady shaped like a stick. A pair of boys with a pack of cards. No Baby. The walk beneath us is broken, snagged. My ankle is a bowl of glass, and with every bump and bang, it shatters.
    The smell of fumes is on us. There’s a chemical sky. Behind me I hear the soft howl of air escaping Arlen’s lungs, the push-through-and-forward of his knees, and now we have come to where we are, and we are still going. The pole of pain that was my leg is my arms now, too. It is my hands and fingers, which have hardened into twist and bone. Up ahead, I spy the local trains in their silver gleams, the white rise of the old station, cut as if from marble, the flower seller making her roses—poking the stems into buckets of water and flapping a blanket to the ground, adjusting a sign. Her roses are yellow; they are red.
    One block more. Three quarters. One half. Arlen riding the curb cuts like a master. A taxi speeds to the curb