All I Love and Know Read Online Free PDF Page A

let me touch my own son,” Lydia murmured.
    Daniel put the form down on a table and leaned over it with straight arms. He stared at it for a long time. Matt stepped up to him and laid his hand on his back, and felt it heave. Finally, Daniel turned toward his father, his face crumpling like a child’s. “Dad,” he whispered.
    Sam stepped forward and took the pen from him and ran his finger down the page, which was mercifully indecipherable to him, found the blank line, and signed.
    And with that, Joel was dead.

CHAPTER 2
    I T WAS FOUR years earlier, and Matt was taking the bus from New York to Northampton, his temple pressed against the cold window. He wore a T-shirt and a leather jacket, and a small overnight bag sat on his lap. On the streets of his neighborhood, the late-March wind whipped around corners, making storefront gratings rattle, and pedestrians picked their way around slush and garbage and discarded flyers for clubs. When Matt left the gym in the mornings, showered and dressed for the office, the morning sun gleamed in his face and made him squint. He’d take the train from Chelsea to midtown, and when he got to work he’d go to the men’s room and wet a paper towel, then scrub at the dirty splotches on the calves of his pants.
    Spring was on its way, and Matt felt it as a ripping sensation in his chest. He was suffering from insomnia for the first time in his life, and had had a few anxiety attacks that made him fear he was having a heart attack. His best friend, Jay, was dying, and he was fighting with Jay’s partner Kendrick, who had been with Jay all of a year while Matt had been his best friend since forever. Kendrick, whom he privately referred to as Shmendrick, was bad-mouthing him to all their friends, claiming that when Matt was around Jay, it was like having to take care of two patients. Matt knew that wasn’t true, knew that when he was with him, a little more of Jay’s soul showed.
    The night before, at around three, when he’d returned home from the clubs, he had rummaged through his desk looking for the stub of a joint he’d left there, and found the matchbook with Daniel’s name and number on it. He took it to bed with him and sat there inhaling smoke, contemplating, until the tiny ragged joint burned his fingers. Once he had the idea that he could leave town, he could hardly wait for morning to come so he could call. He lay in bed imagining a quiet, orderly house in the New England countryside with a guest bedroom that his imagination formed out of a bed-and-breakfast he’d once stayed in: a fluffed-up bed with a dust ruffle and an iron headboard, a painting of English hunters on horseback hanging above. And then, even as he was laughing to himself for being stoned and silly, his mind attached itself to that image with a surprising passion.
    Why Daniel, he wondered later, when he had at least three other friends who lived within a few hours on a bus or train, and when he hardly knew the guy? Later, when he told the story at dinner parties, he insisted he’d had some secret intimation. But at that point, it was just a panicked need to flee the drug scene and the whole circus surrounding Jay, who was back in the hospital with pneumonia, and being sick of his friends, whose eyes were starting to glaze over at the whole topic because, he thought savagely, of their own terror at the risks they were exposing themselves to every day. “I gotta get out of here,” he told Daniel on the phone the next morning, at ten A . M . sharp, the first moment he felt he could call. He’d reminded him that they’d met at a party, and endured the terrifying moment of pause before Daniel said, “I remember.” When Matt asked if he could visit, panic made him lose his breath, and after a long silence that he read as either cold or thoughtful, Daniel said, “Sure, come on up, I have a spare room.”
    Somewhere in Connecticut, it