I Was There the Night He Died Read Online Free PDF

end up paying off their mortgage by the time they’re fifty while still having steadily saved up enough Friday paycheques to help put their kid through university. My dad did.
    â€œDoes it look good?” I say. Not Does the work look good? or Are the people you work with good people? or even Is the pay good? But does it look good that they’ll keep you on so that you can continue buying shitty art for your garage walls and sinfully overpriced blue jeans for your ungrateful children and, more than likely, diapers and baby food and rattles for the spurious spawn of your mouth-breathing eldest son. Creative fulfillment and a positive, nurturing work environment aren’t Chatham workplace priorities. Paying your bills and feeding and clothing your children are.
    Eddie shrugs; I nod into my beer.
    â€œHey, how’s the old—” Eddie says, making a scribbling motion with his non-beer-holding hand “—going?”
    â€œIt’s all right.”
    â€œYou got a new one coming out?”
    â€œI’m working on it.”
    â€œGood stuff. I told you, I’m saving up all your books for my retirement. Gonna get me a hammock and read ‘em all in a row swinging with a brew beside me in the backyard. That’s the way to do it, right?”
    I smile, sip. Eddie will never read any of my books and that’s just fine. Eddie buys my books—one of the few people in Chatham I know who does—and always gets me to inscribe them whenever I next see him. I appreciate the online sale of one novel dutifully purchased every two years or so, but more than that, I appreciate that Eddie is genuinely happy that I’m happy, am pleased that he’s authentically pleased that someone he actually knows ended up doing what they wanted to do with their life. If he couldn’t play defence in the National Hockey League, at least I get to sit on my ass all day making stuff up. Artsy-fartsy deflected glory is still deflected glory.
    â€œHey, that reminds me,” he says. “I got the new one inside. Let me go in and get it so you can put your ol’ John Hancock on it.”
    â€œSure.”
    Before I have time to tour in its entirety even a single wall of Eddie’ tacked-up museum—Detroit players mostly, but the occasionally deserving non-Red Wing as well (mostly long-retired opposition tough guys who could also put the puck in the net, like Terry O’Reilly and Clark Gillies and Cam Neely), Eddie is back in the garage with a pen and a copy of my latest novel still encased in its shipping box. Using a pen knife from his key chain to cut it free, “I figured I’d just keep it in here until you were back in town. That way it wouldn’t get dirty or anything.”
    â€œMakes sense,” I say, taking the liberated book and the pen.
    Eddie watches me while I stand there trying to think of something profound or funny or at least not utterly banal to write on the title page. It’s always easier to sign a book for a stranger than for a friend. A guy who says he came to your reading from Hamilton immediately gets To Fred from the Hammer, Best, Sam Samson , but someone who watched you get beat up in the parking lot of McDonald’s after the Sadie Hawkins dance when you were seventeen and who encouraged you afterward to super-size your meal because you fucking deserve it, man, you never stopped throwing those fucking haymakers even when you were bleeding like a stuck fucking pig, is harder to be so cocky casual with.
    To Steady Eddie , I finally write.
    Health and Happiness.
    Sam.
    Eddie takes back his book, immediately reads what’s there. And giggles. If a 235-pound giggling man doesn’t make you smile, maybe it’s time to consider changing your medication. Closing the book and setting it on top of the fridge, “Where are you off to?” he says. “You got time for one more?”
    Uncle Donny is picking me up at home in an hour to take