In All Deep Places Read Online Free PDF

For Luke, it seemed like his dilemma had just been magnified three times over. And another long day was just beginning.

    By nine o’clock that evening, Luke had convinced his mother to leave the hospital for a night of rest at a nearby hotel. He had offered to drive her home to Halcyon for the night but she refused to make the forty-five-minute trip. He got her situated in a hotel three blocks from the hospital, taking care of the arrangements and escorting her to her room. As he got ready to leave the hotel, his mother looked at him, a question poised on her lips.
    “Luke, I need to ask something of you… something I would never ask if there was any other way…” She stopped.
    Luke knew what it was she wanted to ask him but was struggling to say. He had known all day, ever since his mother had called Lucie at the newspaper to tell her his father had had a stroke. His father’s paper was currently without an editor. He was the most likely and qualified person to step in for a while.
    “I know what you’re going to ask me, Mom,” he said quietly. “It’s all right. I’ll do it. At least until we can make other arrange ments.”
    “I hate to have to ask you,” she said. “I know you never wanted to go back to the paper. But Lucie can’t do it all. And Gretchen and Todd don’t even know how to write. Cubby can only write sports stories. You should have seen the last story he did on the city council. It sounded like a play-by-play of a wrestling match.”
    She was crying again but her sudden humor was welcome—the first he had seen of it since he arrived.
    “It’s not that I hate it, Mom, it just wasn’t the career for me,” he said, trying to reassure her. “It’s not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I don’t hate it, okay? But I honestly can’t stay indefinitely. We may need to think about selling the paper, Mom.”
    She looked up at him, her brief display of humor gone. “You’re already giving up on him?” she said, with a slight edge in her voice.
    “I’m not giving up,” he said, surprised by her response. “I just think we need to be prepared for some unpleasant choices. Mom, he may not be able to—”
    “We don’t know anything yet! We don’t have a crystal ball!” she said, standing at the little table. “Luke, don’t give up on him. You can’t! If you do, he’ll see it. He needs to know he can get well!”
    “Mom, maybe we should talk about this another time. You’re tired, I’m tired.”
    “You must promise me you won’t say a word to him about selling the paper!” his mother insisted. “And you can’t men tion it to me when I am with him. He hears everything just fine. He mustn’t think his life won’t wait for him!”
    “Mom, let’s just forget it for now, okay? I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
    “But you’re already thinking about it,” she said, nearly pouting.
    Luke wanted to collapse into a bed. He wanted sleep. “Mom, please,” he said.
    She was silent for a few seconds. “Promise me you won’t give up on him.”
    Luke looked intently at his mother, trying to match her deter mination.
    “Mom, I will not give up on him,” he said.
    But the newspaper was another matter. He could stay a month, maybe two. But that was it. He had a book to finish. He had a wife and kids back in Connecticut. He had a life. And it wasn’t here in Iowa.

    Although his mother wouldn’t go back to Halcyon for the night, Luke would. He would need to stop by the newspaper in the morning anyway. Lucie would be eager to know how Jack was… and what the future held. The latter question was as hard for Luke to consider as his writer’s block. Halcyon in the late spring moon light looked as peaceful and serene as its name suggested. The tree-lined residential streets were dotted here and there with the warm hues of creamy yellow and fairy blue; colors cast by porch lights and glowing TV screens in living-room windows as Luke made his way through town. His