So Much for That Read Online Free PDF

right. The taxes would have killed us.”
    “Always money, Shepherd,” she chided.
    It struck him then how people who acted above money—arty types like his sister, or his Old-Testament father—were the same folks who never earned any to speak of. Glynis knew perfectly well that The Afterlife had to add up financially or it would solely constitute a long, ruinous vacation.
    “But you’ve paralyzed us at both ends, haven’t you?” he proceeded.
    “Not only is no destination good enough, but it’s never the right time to go. We have to wait until Amelia is out of high school. We have to wait until Amelia is out of college. We have to wait until Zach is out of primary school. Middle school. Now it’s high school, and then why not college? We have to wait for our investments to recover from the tech-stock crash, and then from 9/11. Well, they have.”
    Shep wasn’t used to talking so much, and babbling made him feel foolish. He may have been as dependent on resistance as Glynis, which is to say: hers. “You think I’m being selfish. Maybe I am. For once. This isn’t about money, it’s about”—he paused in embarrassment—“my soul. You’ll say, you have said, that it won’t be what I expect. I accept that. It’s not as if I nurse a misguided idea about parking myself on the beach. Iknow sun gets boring, that there are flies. Still, I can tell you this much: I plan to get eight hours of sleep. That sounds small, but it’s not small. I love sleeping, Glynis, and”—he didn’t want to choke up now, not until he got it all out—“I especially love sleeping with you. But when I say I crave eight hours of sleep, at a Westchester dinner party? They laugh . For commuters around here, that’s such a preposterous ambition that it’s actually funny.
    “So I don’t care what else I’ll do in Pemba or whether the power keeps cutting off. Because if I back down this time? I’d know in my heart of hearts that we’re never really going to go. And with no promised land to look forward to, I can’t keep it up, Gnu. I can’t keep cleaning up the messes that the untrained klutzes at Hardly Handy Randy leave behind. I can’t keep sitting in traffic for hours listening to NPR on the West Side Highway. I can’t keep running to the A-and-P for milk and getting ‘bonus points’ on our store card so that after spending several thousand dollars we qualify for a free Turkey on Thanksgiving.”
    “There are worse fates.”
    “No,” he said. “I’m not sure there are. I know we’ve seen plenty of poverty—raw sewage running in gutters and mothers scavenging for mango peels. But they know what’s wrong with their lives, and they have a notion that with a few shillings or pesos or rupees in their pockets things could be better. There’s something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn’t get any better and it’s still shit. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but Jackson is right: it’s a sell, Glynis. I must have forty different ‘passwords’ for banking and telephone and credit card and Internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them all up and that’s our lives. And it’s all ugly, physically ugly. The strip malls in Elmsford, the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and Home Depots…all plastic and chrome with blaring, clashing colors, and everyone in a hurry, to do what?”
    It was not his imagination. She really wasn’t paying attention.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve heard this before. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I really will skulk back home a few weeks later all hangdogand sheepish. But I’d rather the humiliation of trying and failing than give it up. Giving it up would be like dying.”
    “I think you’ll find”—her voice was so measured, piped full of some great new wisdom he did not care for—“that it would not in the least be like dying. There is nothing like dying. We