Loving Emily Read Online Free PDF

“Michael died last night. In a car accident.”
    Rosario steps backward, her hand flying up to her mouth as it opens in shock. She has watched Michael and me grow up together. Seeing her eyes fill with tears, mine do, too. She puts her arms around me, like when I was small and would still let her hug me. We are both crying now. We sit together on her old sofa, while I tell her the story.
    Then I trudge past the laundry room and through the kitchen, looking for Mom. I need to tell her about Michael. In addition to our dads’ working together, my mom does charity stuff with Yancy, and our two families take vacations together every year.
    The tea party’s still going, with all the mothers and daughters eating lunch outside. I find Mom sitting between my twin sisters. Molly has put bows in her hair and is looking around, all excited and drinking tea from this little cup. Maddy, slumped over, gives me a gloomy look and pulls at the neck of her dress. I speak into Mom’s ear in a low voice. “I gotta talk to you.”
    “Now, Ryan? I’m busy!” But, seeing my face, she gets up and lets me lead her to a quiet patio, feeling the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. As I tell her about Michael, she sags a little, going pale under all that stuff she wears on her face. I put an arm around her shoulder to steady her, and she leans against me. She’s so small and thin, it’s like holding a baby bird.
    “We have to call Doug,” she says. She pulls out her cell phone, reaches him on the seventeenth hole with Jared Abernathy, and gives him the news. The connection’s bad, so Dad keeps breaking up. In between the static, words and phrases come from the receiver—
call Nat, tragic, coming home now—
until right at the end, before he and Mom hang up, I finally hear one entire sentence.
    “Thank God Ryan wasn’t in that car with him.”

Chapter 6
    T hat night, I lie in bed and think of Camp Evergreen, where Michael and I went for five summers, starting when we were eight.
    Every summer started the same way. The first free moment we had on the first day, Michael and I would run down to the lake to fish for crawdads. On this one side of the dock near the shore, where the lake was only two feet deep, you could see crawdads crawling over the stones. They were the same dull brown as the rocky lake bottom and looked like lobsters, only a lot smaller.
    All we did was tie a string around a chunk of bacon or baloney from the camp kitchen and lower it in front of a crawdad. Once it had sunk its claws into your bacon chunk, it was not letting go, even if we hauled it up into the air. We kept our prisoners in a pail of water and eventually slipped them back into the lake.
    Some crawdads were easier to tell apart from the others. That was how we knew we were catching some of the same ones over and over. We even gave names to our favorites.
    “Okay, Captain Hook’s going for another ride,” I would say, hauling up for the fourth time a big one with a missing left claw.
    “Come to Poppa, Elvira.” That was Michael, as he repeatedly pulled up an unusual all-black one with a thing for baloney.
    “Face it, these things are stupid,” I told Michael. “They just get caught over and over.”
    “We’re the stupid ones,” Michael said. “They’ve gotten dinner, and meanwhile, all we’ve got’s an empty bucket.” We cracked up, picturing the crawdads with their full bellies down on the lake bottom, laughing at us poor, pathetic humans.
    I hadn’t thought about the crawdads for a long time, until this last summer, in fact. It was about two months before Michael died. He and I were at one of the Lobster Barrel restaurants with some friends. I remember Jonathan was there, and they were giving out these red plastic lobster key chains for an anniversary celebration. One of them arrived with our check.
    “Ryan, look, it’s a crawdad!” Michael had said.
    “It’s a lobster, man,” I said.
    “For us, it’s a crawdad. We used to catch