Is This Tomorrow: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

back into the living room and sat on the couch. It felt like two different days, the worry about Brian and the joy about Jake. But it was important to remember that she deserved happiness and had worked hard for it. They were two very different people, Brian and Jake. History didn’t have to do any repeating.
    She got up and brushed some dust off the edge of the couch, then she glanced at her watch. Seven thirty. How did it get to be so late? Where was Lewis? She looked outside, at the waning light splashing across the neighborhood.
    Jimmy had said his mom was at the Our Lady’s carnival, but when she spotted a light across the street, she called Dot, who sounded exasperated. “Jimmy’s not home, either,” Dot said.
    “Those boys,” Ava said, relieved. Lewis wasn’t alone then.
    “And girl. Count Rose in, too.” Dot sighed. “At least they’re together, having fun,” she said.
    “The Three Mouseketeers,” Ava said, and Dot laughed.
    “They’re good kids,” Dot said. “We’re lucky they have each other.”
    Ava didn’t want to spoil her good mood by yelling at Lewis when he got home, nor did she want to risk making him surly and silent when Jake got there. No, she’d rise above it, the way she did at work when Richard decided he needed to throw his weight around as the boss and stood in front of the whole typing pool and blamed her for botching a sale of the new turquoise sinks they were pushing, when she and everyone else knew all Ava did was type invoices and letters, and the real reason they hadn’t sold was because the sinks were so ugly no one wanted them. The other women had looked at her as if she were to blame, too, or maybe they were just glad she was the one being chewed out, instead of them.
    No, she’d bide her time. She’d talk to Lewis later about responsibility and considering other people. He’d bow his head as if he were praying, but she knew him: he acted like he didn’t care sometimes, but he was a sensitive kid. He’d take it to heart.
    She glanced out the big picture window. Some of the neighbors were walking home with their kids, holding on to balloons and stuffed animals from the carnival, carrying covered aluminum dishes of food. She saw wives greeting their men, already home from work, flinging their arms around them, talking and laughing. By eight o’clock, she was furious, wondering if Lewis was doing this deliberately. Jake would be here soon. Her good mood, her joy, wilted. The daisies in the glass now looked faded, her dress felt wrinkled, and the jazz albums she had put out casually on the table seemed suddenly forced and stupid, so she got up and put them back in the album rack. What was she supposed to tell Jake when he showed up and there was this silent spot where her son was supposed to be? How would the evening go now?
    She walked to the kitchen, knocking her hip against the edge of the table, placing one hand over the jab of pain, and then she reached toward the phone, about to call Dot again, when it rang. Lewis, she bet. At the Wal-Lex bowling alley or the skating rink, his voice hushed with apology. At the library. All the places he usually went to and she wouldn’t have been so angry if it hadn’t been this one special night for her. If it hadn’t meant so much.
    “I don’t know where Jimmy and Rose are,” Dot said, “And frankly I’m beginning to worry.” Ava leaned against the kitchen wall, shutting her eyes. She wasn’t afraid. Not then.
    “Those kids are so irresponsible,” Ava said. “They all have watches—why can’t they learn to use them?” She thought of Lewis’s Superman watch, red and bright yellow. She had scoured all of Boston for it for Lewis’s birthday, wrapping the timepiece up, buying a card, and forging Brian’s name, so he’d think his father had remembered him. Lewis never took it off. He even slept with it on. When people asked him who gave it to him, he always said, “My dad.”
    The roar of a motorcycle split the