Fly Away Read Online Free PDF

know.”
    “We can do it,” he said, although he heard the unsteadiness of his voice.
    “Yeah. Sure we can,” Marah said with a sigh. Then: “Come on, boys, let’s get ready
     for bed.”
    Johnny knew he should stay, comfort Marah, but he had no words.
    Instead, he took the coward’s route and left the room, closing the door behind him.
    He went downstairs, and ignoring everyone, pushed through the crowd. He grabbed his
     coat from the laundry room and went outside.
    It was full-on night now, and there wasn’t a star in the sky. A thin layer of clouds
     obscured them. A cool breeze ruffled through the trees on his property line, made
     the skirtlike boughs dance.
    In the tree limbs overhead, Mason jars hung from strands of ropy twine, their insides
     full of black stones and votive candles. How many nights had he and Kate sat out here
     beneath a tiara of candlelight, listening to the waves hitting their beach and talking
     about their dreams?
    He grabbed the porch rail to steady himself.
    “Hey.”
    Her voice surprised and irritated him. He wanted to be alone.
    “You left me dancing all by myself,” Tully said, coming up beside him. She had a blue
     wool blanket wrapped around her; its end dragged on the ground at her bare feet.
    “It must be intermission,” he said, turning to her.
    “What do you mean?”
    He could smell tequila on her breath and wondered how drunk she was. “The Tully Hart
     center-of-attention show. It must be intermission.”
    “Kate asked me to make tonight fun,” she said, drawing back. She was shaking.
    “I can’t believe you didn’t come to her funeral,” he said. “It would have broken her
     heart.”
    “She knew I wouldn’t come. She even—”
    “And that makes it okay? Don’t you think Marah would have liked to see you in there?
     Or don’t you care about your goddaughter?”
    Before she could answer—and what could she say?—he pushed away from her and went back
     inside, tossing his coat on the washing machine as he passed through the laundry room.
    He knew he’d lashed out unfairly. In another time, in another world, he’d care enough
     to apologize. Kate would want him to, but right now he couldn’t manage the effort.
     It took everything he had inside just to keep standing. His wife had been gone for
     forty-eight hours and already he was a worse version of himself.

 
    Three
    That night, at four A.M. , Johnny gave up on the idea of sleep. How had he thought it would be possible to
     find peace on the night of his wife’s funeral?
    He pushed the comforter back and climbed out of bed. Rain hammered the shake roof,
     echoed through the house. At the fireplace in the bedroom, he touched the switch and
     after a thump-whiz of sound, blue and orange flames burst to life, skating along the fake log. The faint
     smell of gas floated to him. He lost a few minutes standing there, staring into the
     fire.
    After that, he found himself drifting. It was the only word he could come up with
     to describe the wandering that took him from room to room. More than once, he found
     himself standing somewhere, staring at something with no clear memory of how he’d
     come to be there or why he’d begun that particular journey.
    Somehow, he ended up back in his bedroom. Her water glass was still on the nightstand.
     So were her reading glasses and the mittens she’d worn to bed at the end, when she’d
     always been cold. As clear as the sound of his own breathing, he heard her say, You were the one for me, John Ryan. I loved you with every breath I took for two decades. It was what she’d said to him on her last night. They’d lain in bed together, with
     him holding her because she was too weak to hold on to him. He remembered burying
     his face in the crook of her neck, saying, Don’t leave me, Katie. Not yet.
    Even then, as she lay dying, he had failed her.
    He got dressed and went downstairs.
    The living room was filled with watery gray light. Rain dropped from the