No Time for Goodbye Read Online Free PDF Page A

wave, so that she could pick her out even sooner, but Grace had been stubborn about complying.
    The problem came when some teacher asked the class to stay after the bell had rung. Maybe it was a mass detention, or some last-minute homework instructions. Grace would sit there, panicking, not because Cynthia would be worrying, but because it might mean her mom, worried by the delay, would come into the school and hunt her down.
    “Also, my telescope’s broken,” Grace said.
    “What do you mean, it’s broken?”
    “The thingies that hold the telescope part to the standy part are loose. I sort of fixed it, but it’ll probably get loose again.”
    “I’ll have a look at it.”
    “I have to keep a lookout for killer asteroids,” Grace said. “I’m not going to be able to see them if my telescope is broken.”
    “Okay. I said I’ll look at it.”
    “Do you know that if an asteroid hit the Earth it would be like a million nuclear bombs going off?”
    “I don’t think it’s that many,” I said. “But I take your point, that it would be a bad thing.”
    “When I have nightmares about an asteroid hitting the Earth, I can make them go away if I’ve checked before I go to bed to make sure there isn’t any coming.”
    I nodded. The thing was, we hadn’t exactly bought her the most expensive telescope. It was a bottom-of-the-line item. It wasn’t just that you didn’t want to spend a fortune on something you weren’t sure your child was going to stay interested in; we simply don’t have a lot of money to throw around.
    “What about Mom?” Grace asked.
    “What about her?”
    “Does she have to walk with me?”
    “I’ll talk to her,” I said.
    “Talk to who?” Cynthia said, walking into the kitchen.
    Cynthia looked good this morning. Beautiful, in fact. She was a striking woman, and I never tired of her green eyes, high cheekbones, fiery red hair. Not long like when I first met her, but no less dramatic. People think she must work out, but I think it’s anxiety that’s helped her keep her figure. She burns off calories worrying. She doesn’t jog, doesn’t belong to a gym. Not that we could afford a gym membership anyway.
    Like I’ve mentioned, I’m a high school English teacher, and Cynthia works in retail—even though she has a family studies degree and worked for a while doing social work—so we’re not exactly rolling in dough. We have this house, big enough for the three of us, in a modest neighborhood that’s only a few blocks from where Cynthia grew up. You might have thought Cynthia would have wanted to put some distance between herself and that house, but I think she wanted to stay in the neighborhood, just in case someone came back and wanted to get in touch.
    Our cars are both ten years old, our vacations low key. We borrow my uncle’s cabin up near Montpelier for a week every summer, and three years ago, when Grace was five, we took a trip to Walt Disney World, staying outside the park in a cheap motel in Orlando where you could hear, at two in the morning, some guy in the next room telling his girl to be careful, to ease up on the teeth.
    But we have, I believe, a pretty good life, and we are, more or less, happy. Most days.
    The nights, sometimes, can be hard.
    “Grace’s teacher,” I said.
    “What do you want to talk to Grace’s teacher for?” Cynthia asked.
    “I was just saying, when it’s one of those parent-teacher nights, I should go in and talk to her, to Mrs. Enders,” I said. “Last time, you went in, I had a parent-teacher thing at my school the same night, it always seems to happen that way.”
    “She’s very nice,” Cynthia said. “I think she’s a lot nicer than your teacher last year, what’s-her-name, Mrs. Phelps. I thought she was a bit mean.”
    “I hated her,” Grace concurred. “She made us stand on one leg for hours when we were bad.”
    “I have to go,” I said, taking another sip of cold coffee. “Cyn, I think we need a new