Saving Jason Read Online Free PDF

chocolate hazelnut gelato.
    “Buffalo?” she said with a teasing grin.
    “Bison,” I said. I had just finished telling her of my adventures that day.
    “I’ve always pictured them as noble and stoic.”
    “They’re also territorial, protective of their offspring, and really big.”
    “Why would someone use buffalo instead of guard dogs?”
    “Why do I get the feeling you’re not taking this seriously? I could have been killed.”
    “When I told you that I didn’t want you to be involved in anything dangerous, I meant no guns or people trying to drown you, and stay away from people who want to beat you up.”
    “It’s not like I seek them out, you know.”
    “You climbed over the fence, Jason. Weren’t there warning signs? Like ‘Keep Out’ or ‘Danger—Guard Buffalo’? You invaded their space.”
    I was beginning to feel surrounded. “Guard bison.”
    I waved at the Kid. My son was having dinner in a separate booth across the dining room, accompanied by our good friend Roger. Roger was a retired clown, a practicing alcoholic, and an often rude and uncouth companion whom I had met and befriended years before my troubles with the law began. When I got out of prison, he picked up the friendship as though there had never been a break. I owed him a lot, not least for introducing me to a woman named Wanda Tyler, whom I had nicknamed Skeli. She had been his sometime assistant, when he performed at Park Avenue birthday parties or corporate sales meetings. Jacques Emo and Wanda the Wandaful.
    The Kid did not wave back. He blinked. That may have been an important message, but I couldn’t be sure. My seven-year-old son, named for both his father and grandfather, had unusual methods of communication. And he refused to be called Jason. The sobriquet was his idea. He occupied a block on the autism continuum, shifting his exact location often enough to keep me and his teachers on constant alert. His mother—Angie, my ex—had never been able to connect with him and it broke her fragile heart. She died protecting him.
    It was the autism that defined where we dined. The Athena had demonstrated an acceptance of some of my son’s more bizarre eccentricities, such as screaming “Poo” at the top of his lungs when he saw me put mustard on my corned beef, or flying into a screaming tantrum whenever James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” played on the radio, a reaction that, in my opinion, was a tad operatic but thoroughly justified. I had frequently contributed to the waiters’ retirement funds with hundred-dollar tips to ensure our subsequent welcomes. So far, it was all working.
    Roger was performing an act of supreme generosity by eating dinner with the Kid in order to give Skeli and me a few minutes to enjoy each other’s company. Dinner with the Kid could be harrowing to the uninitiated—it could be harrowing to the experienced, too.
    “I outran a maddened wild creature to be here with you,” I said, giving in to the spirit of her taunts.
    “I thought you said you had a quarter-mile head start,” she said.
    “Not quite.”
    She laughed. I liked her laugh. It was free and uncomplicated, and I wanted to make her laugh all the time just like that.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, though not sorry at all. “I’m sure it was scary, but I’m having too good a time picturing you doing the hundred-yard dash and scaling a ten-foot fence in five-hundred-dollar shoes while being chased by a cow.”
    “Bull,” I said. “And it wasn’t a bovine, it was—”
    “A bison. I know. Isn’t a bison a bovine?”
    “I have no idea,” I said.
    “What’s the difference?”
    “Cows commit murder a lot less frequently than buffalo.”
    “Ha! Even the world’s greatest expert can slip and call a bison a buffalo.”
    She was having fun, and I was having fun watching her. She could tease me forever as long as she kept up that laugh.
    She switched gears on me. “You haven’t asked me about my day.”
    “True. But I thought