Chasing Forgiveness Read Online Free PDF Page A

severe gross-out. I don’t know. Does this mean I’m prejudiced?
    The spinning football cuts through the windy gray sky, out of my reach, but I dive for the thing. I won’t miss this one—this pass is mine. I skin my elbows against the ground, but the ball lands in my arms, and I pull it close to me so it doesn’t have a chance to escape.
    â€œTouchdown!” yells Russ, but I will not spike the ball like Weavin’ Warren Sharp. I will not do his little dance—not now, not ever. No matter how fast he drives me in his Ferrari.
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    It would be easy, I say to myself, to just hang around and wait until everything works out, like Grandma says it will. I could just go to school and play ball and go to track practiceand come home and eat and watch TV and go to bed, letting everyone else make my decisions for me. They’ll do that if I let them. Maybe that’s okay for Tyler—he’s only six—but it’s not okay for me. I’ll be making my own decision today.
    Alone in my room, I close my shutters, jump onto my bed, and cry a little into the pillow when I think about how quickly everything seems to have fallen apart. I don’t cry a lot, just enough to get some of the lousiness out of me. Kind of like letting a drop of air out of a bicycle tire so it doesn’t blow up. I cry just a little—the air gets out, and the sadness turns itself into anger, which is fine. I like being angry a whole lot more than being sad.
    Tyler comes in, turns on the television, and flicks the stations until he finds some old cartoon. Tyler is not sad or angry. He’s just there.
    I can’t stand the way he sits there, so calm and quiet—so I turn off the TV, and Tyler turns it back on, and I turn it off again.
    â€œPreston!” he whines.
    â€œKeep it off, or get out,” I tell him in a really mean tone of voice. The kind of tone that Mom hates for me to use on him.
    Smiling Tyler doesn’t smile at this.
    Tears form in his eyes. Good. It’s about time he cried about something that went on in this house.
    He lies on the floor and sobs. I let him. I lie on my back looking up at the rough gritty texture of the ceiling. It’s likelooking at clouds. If you look long enough you can see shapes up there. Circles. Animals. You can find whatever you’re looking for. I’ve seen lots of things. I’ve seen an elephant . . . a house . . . Jesus . . . Weavin’ Warren’s Ferrari. Only thing is, once you blink, it’s gone, and you can never find the same thing again.
    I begin to wonder if the house we move into after escrow will have the same rough-textured ceilings—or if they’ll be flat and empty.
    I get up and leave the room to tell Mom what I have decided to tell her.
    In the kitchen, Mom has just gotten off the phone.
    â€œThat was Aunt Jackie,” she says. “I think we’ll all be moving in with her for a while, when we move out of here.” And then she adds, “You, me, and Tyler,” just in case I might have thought Dad was included in the package.
    I watch Mom as she sets some water boiling. Even doing something as simple as boiling water, she is beautiful. Her long bouncy blond hair is the kind you see on shampoo commercials. The soft curves of her face and her smile could win the Miss America contest—and her face doesn’t show a single sign of age, like some of my friends’ moms.
    There’s something different about her now. It’s something good, yet somehow it scares me. It’s the way she moves as she cooks our spaghetti dinner—she cooks with confidence and control, as if she knows what she’s doing and she’s gladabout it. Everything about her is like that nowadays. It’s as if being away from Dad has given Mom her life back. It’s as if she’s happy. I don’t know how she could be happy without Dad—I