Steinbeck’s Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page B

old days at the library. But mostly they swam. And dived and slid down the slide. Maybe it was the clouds, but hardly anyone else was at the pool. Travis kept a lookout for Hil, but he never showed up. Which was okay, Travis decided. He was more than happy to hang out with his parents again, just the three of them.
    But in the afternoon his parents began to drift away. His mother went back to the house to start dinner, and his father begged off more pool time and lay down under the big oak tree.
    Travis swam and swam—he felt like he could live in the pool. At one point, for no real reason, he looked over at his father.
    His father was sitting up and holding his BlackBerry, poking it with a tiny stylus.
    Travis watched for a long time. While his father stared at the tiny computer, his face didn’t move at all, and Travis couldn’t tell what his father was feeling or thinking. He always used to be able to read his father, no matter what his mood. But right now his father didn’t look happy or sad or angry or interested or bored. He just stared.
    Before the new jobs and the new house, life had been different at home. It seemed like their house was always full. His dad was there, playing music or helping Travis with his homework or just goofing around. His mom, too, who always came home right after her day of teaching third grade. Mostly everyone was home together, doing “ life stuff ,” which is what his family called the ordinary events of their lives.
    His dad worked at Sheila’s a few nights a week, and sometimes he had gigs with the Not Band on weekends, and his mom occasionally had meetings at night, but the house was never empty. Even after his parents went back to college a few years ago, they were still around all the time. They had their regular jobs
and
homework, but they were home. Everyone was together.
    Then they finished their degrees, got new jobs at the same software company in Gilroy, and moved to Bella Linda Terrace. Travis was really starting to hate their new life; it confused him. All that work to get new jobs to make more money to buy a big house, and they were never in that new house.
    His parents told Travis they knew these changes were hard on him, but he was a big kid now, they said, and could take care of himself.
He
knew he could take care of himself, but he didn’t have to like it.
    His father owned four guitars, two keyboards, a herd of harmonicas, and tambourines and other instruments to bang on—bongos, congas, egg shakers—as well as tape decks, speakers, microphones. All this equipment sat in the new garage, unpacked, pushed into one corner. Now there was only the BlackBerry; it had stolen his father’s brain.
    His father set down the BlackBerry and called Travis out of the pool, time to go.
    The house was filled with the scent of his mom’s spaghetti sauce and garlic bread, but she wasn’t in the kitchen. Travis called out, but she didn’t answer. She was in her office. He stood outside the office door and listened to the keys of her computer madly clacking.

    Sunday was okay. In the morning they went shopping at the big mall north of town. It was a Pants Expedition, one of the funny ways Travis’s family shopped—one piece of clothing at a time, shirts or shoes or underwear. They’d shopped like this for years. Today it was pants, and for some reason they all found the word
pants
, even the very idea of pants, funny. They ate lunch at Rotten Roger’s Crab Hut, a cheesy chain place, and they all thought that was pretty funny, too.
    In the afternoon they went to the pool again, which was much more crowded today. Even Hil was there, and he and Travis played Camazotz zombies, stiff - armed and brick-stepping off the high dive. When Hil and his family left, Travis and his parents sat under the biggest of the scraggly oaks around the pool, and they all read quietly together. His parents were starting to look relaxed.
    Through the branches of the oak, the sky was still feathery