City of Strangers Read Online Free PDF

wondered if that was enough to make it legal. And what would a sudden rainstorm do to it, a billion soggy little bears?
    It had been hard enough to tear himself away from the church, and now this. A sign on the roof of the car said, Disenchantment will never prevail.
    A deferred message from above, he supposed, since he’d been offered no revelation in the church.
    Maeve looked up from Wuthering Heights to see her mother hovering tentatively in the doorway of her bedroom. Tentative wasn’t her mother’s style, so she knew something was up. “Did I forget to do something?”
    “No, no. I was just wondering if you’d seen your father recently.”
    Maeve wriggled, set a fancy leather bookmark between pages, adjusted the footrest of the old recliner—generally did all she could to stall. “I’m not sure how you want me to answer. I know he’s missed two support payments.” That was the deal. No child support, no visits—though Maeve was almost sixteen years old now.
    Her mom grimaced and waggled a hand, erasing that idea right out of the air. “I’m not on the warpath. I saw Alice at the market, and she said she and Warren ran into Jack somewhere and he looked like he was in pretty bad shape. He took losing Marlena hard, didn’t he?”
    Maeve felt a chill on her spine. The deal was, adults were supposed to take care of themselves, quite privately, so you could have your own growing-up crises and they could attend to you, but it never seemed to work out that way. Her mom had a running problem, too, with her new husband, Bradley, who labored under what Maeve had come to see as a small-man complex, which meant you could never cross him directly, but had to work around him in some way that his tiny brain would not notice. As far as she was concerned, Brad could shrivel up and die any day he liked, but Maeve loved her real father to distraction, unreservedly, with an ache that went all the way through her.
    “He and Mar got along pretty well, but they didn’t have very much in common,” Maeve said. “She was going to one of those churches where they think Jesus already has his landing gear down. I think when she left him, it just brought out a lot of his other stuff.”
    Maeve could see her mother decide consciously to leave the snotty comment about Jesus alone. “Do you think he’s drinking?”
    It was drink, long ago, and the disorder that went with it, that had ended up sending Maeve to Two-family City. “No, he’s pretty firm on that now.”
    “Alice said she’d never seen anyone so downcast and unsteady. Would you like to go see him?”
    Maeve felt herself light up. “Really?”
    “You’re on school break. Why don’t you go cheer him up.”
    Maeve was up out of the chair in an instant, hugging her mother. “Oh, thank you, Mom.”
    “I care for Jack, too.”
    Jack Liffey adjusted the hard chair to face the wall of his apartment. He took off his wristwatch and set it in front of him. He rested his palms flat on his knees, closed his eyes, and started to inhale deeply the way a meditation-besotted blind date had insisted on showing him, sucking air into every nook and cranny of his lungs that he could visualize. Then he exhaled until his belly tucked in under his ribs and his throat creaked a little. He carried on this way while repeating in his head one of the mantras she had suggested: I’m strong today, I’m forgiving. Whatever.
    After about fifteen minutes, he’d end up good and buzzed for a while. You could call it meditation if you wanted, but he figured what he was really doing was altering his blood chemistry, hyperventilating. It was probably the way mystics and sufis and dervishes had always cranked themselves up to the point where they heard their gods talking to them. He knew it knocked his blood pressure back and left him woozy, so it was as good a substitute as he knew for a stiff shot of single-malt scotch.
    About two-thirds of the way through his allotted time, Loco stirred and