Grist Mill Road Read Online Free PDF

onto his childhood, which had been easy enough to speak about, right up until the point at which he neared the end of his twelfth year, August 18, six days short of his thirteenth birthday. That’s when he had felt his breaths starting to shorten, an inability to swallow, and he couldn’t get the words to come out.
    Would you like to try writing it down for me, Patrick?
    I don’t know.
    You don’t ever have to show it to me. Not unless you want to.
    *   *   *
    HE OPENS IT ON HIS computer, the page blank but for a title, 1982 . Every attempt to write about it has ended in deletion. A delete button cleanse, a delete button peel. He stares at the screen for a while trying to recall all of his colorless, shapeless feelings.
    Nothing.
    And so Patrick decides instead to describe the mountains, the pitch pines and blueberry bushes, the smooth water of the lake.
    Sure, Paddyboy, start out with the stuff that really matters.
    He looks away from his laptop angrily and now the only thing he can think about is the way Dr. Rosenstock’s mostly bald head reflects the light from his reading lamp.
    Patrick never knows how much he should say, how much to reveal in that room with its unruly ficus and glimpses of Central Park through the window. What if Dr. Rosenstock has a duty to report him to someone?
    Not that Patrick is planning to kill anyone, not exactly. And probably everyone has thought about such things. To some degree, at least. No?
    Although often Patrick wonders how much potential he has, because if you think about something often enough, when does going through with it become inevitable?
    He looks back at his laptop and types a line.
    And again he can picture his wife sitting across from him at the kitchen table, Hannah nodding approvingly. It’s like I always say, Patch. Don’t bury the lede.
    He looks back down at his computer—
    I remember the gunshots made a wet sort of sound, phssh phssh phssh, and each time he hit her she screamed.
    The line shocks him. His wife is right, of course.
    *   *   *
    GLANCING ACROSS AT THE TIME, Patrick sees it is nearly twelve o’clock, three hours to kill before his appointment with Dr. Rosenstock, and he tells himself not to but he knows that hewill. He can feel it in his shoulders, something dragging him up. Don Trevino has started to fill the empty hours of his life. Trevino is fast becoming another hobby.
    Patrick closes his laptop and goes to find shoes.
    Outside, the sidewalk is strewn with salt, little manufactured pellets like crumbs of polystyrene, but the promised snow hasn’t yet fallen on the city. Patrick heads uptown and east, his route a boxy zigzag as he tries to avoid the red hands of the crosswalks, only getting caught at the curb a couple of times. He likes it when the lights fall kindly for him—recently things as small as this have become capable of almost making or breaking his days.
    The traffic slides around him like blocks of a puzzle, pictures coming together and then dismantling again across the vast grid of midtown Manhattan.
    As he walks, he thinks about the perfect abandoned barn he has conjured up in his imagination. He thinks about its restoration, helping out in overalls, tired limbs satisfied at the end of the day. And there it stands, finished, the words RED MOOSE BARN printed on a wooden sign that hangs by the road, the red silhouette of a moose beneath the words, the same symbol they will stamp onto menus, cards, brown paper napkins. Everything is finished, the barn freshly painted barn red with white sugar-frosting trims and white roof. Red Moose Barn, sixty, seventy miles north of the city, far enough that country food would feel right, close enough that city people would have weekend homes in the area. Country food made with modern techniques. Comfort made perfect.
    Eventually they could turn the land around the barn into a vegetable garden. Golden zucchini blossoms, scarlet