Bedtime Story Read Online Free PDF

seriously, Chris. You couldn’t even be bothered to come to his ballgame? On his birthday?”
    “I—”
    “And that book. It’s like you don’t even know him. You spend more time with him than any other dad I know spends with his kids, and it’s like it doesn’t even register.”
    “That’s not—”
    “Do you even know who Rob Sterling is?”
    She was so quick with the question, I knew that she had been waiting to use it. And I couldn’t answer.
    “I didn’t think so.” She shook her head and looked away. “He’s his coach, Chris. Coach Sterling. David talks about him every day. Do you even listen?”
    I leaned forward on the couch. “Of course I listen.”
    “Really? Then why didn’t you get him what he wanted for his birthday? Instead, you get him that …” She nodded toward the book on the coffee table. David had taken all of his other gifts upstairs to his room.
    “He’s going to like it,” I said, aware even as I was speaking the wordsthat they weren’t going to make any difference. “When I was a kid—”
    “Exactly,” she said, so loudly I almost flinched. “That’s exactly it, Chris. When
you
were a kid. This isn’t about you. This is about David. It’s
his
birthday. And you couldn’t even be bothered—”
    “Right,” I said, leaning forward to set my wineglass on the coffee table and pick up the book. “You’re right.” I stood up. “It’s probably not worth getting into it all again. I’m gonna go.”
    “Chris,” she said to my back as I turned out of the room, but I didn’t respond.
    I walked through the house and out the back door. I navigated the narrow path in the spill of light from the kitchen window and unlocked the door in the back of the garage.
    He sat up slowly, listening to the faint sound of his parents’ voices as they rose up the stairs, drifted through the partly open door.
    After a few moments, the voices grew louder, not really shouting but definitely upset. It was impossible to ignore them, to tune them out. He couldn’t make out actual words, just a texture of voices raised in anger.
    Biting his lip, he stood up and walked across the room, careful to be quiet. He closed his door fully, and darted back to bed in the dark, pulling the covers up to his chin and burying his head in the pillow.
    He could barely hear the voices, now.
    I’m not gonna cry
, he told himself.
I’m not gonna cry
.
    The narrow staircase was dim with the light from my desk lamp, which I left on from four in the morning until I went to bed. In the shadows of the small kitchen, I filled a glass with vodka from the bottle in my freezer. I set the glass on top of the morning’s pages and sat down at my desk.
    Why did it always have to go so bad so fast?
    I pulled my cigarettes out of my pocket and set my lighter on the desk next to this morning’s work. The engraving caught the light. After tapping a cigarette out, I put it to my lips, savouring the feel of it there, its light presence.
    For a long time, I had allowed myself a single cigarette each day, just before I turned in. It was a holdover from my days as a smoker, and was supposed to be a reward, a way of recognizing a good day’s work, a capstone to a productive time. Now, I was smoking compulsively again, my hands shaking as I flicked the lighter, as I held the flame to the paper waiting for that subtle crackle.
    As I drew in the first smooth lungful of smoke, I ran my thumb across the lettering on the lighter.
    C OASTAL D RIFT
C HRISTOPHER J. K NOX
S PRING 2000
    The Zippo had been a gift from my Canadian editor. He had lit my cigar with it at the launch party for my first book, then handed it to me with a broad grin and an arm draped drunkenly across my shoulders.
    “To the first of many,” he had toasted me.
    “Right,” I muttered to the memory, throwing the lighter onto the desk and taking a healthy swallow of the icy vodka. It chilled all the way down, and when the burn hit my stomach I shivered.
    That had