The Accidental Book Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

and down the words like a bus on a hilly highway. She’d think about the last book they’d read together—the one she read to him at his bedside—the one they didn’t finish. She’d recall the last sentence she’d read to him—
Adele came to him in his sleep that night—
and how she’d so often wished that she had kept on reading that night, pressing on until the story was finished. Mostly she’d think just that.
Our story was not yet done. In so many ways.
    But something about the hotel room made it particularly difficult to sleep. Maybe it was the way his empty half of the bed made her feel sunken into her half, her aliveness shrieking at her every second of the night. They’d rented a bed for Wayne at the very end, had placed it in the unused dining room just off the kitchen. Jean could then tend to him without schlepping up and down the stairs, and she could be close enough to spot the end when it came near (which she did, falsely, about a million times over those last couple of months, always feeling like a grim specter of doom lurking in the doorway, tissues at the ready). But, most important, and Jean knew this but didn’t really know it, didn’t face it baldly—moving Wayne to the dining room meant that he wouldn’t bring death to their bed. They’d loved there. They’d
made
love there. It was a sacred place, a place where their relationship came alive.
    True, he never laid his cancer down in their bed, but his absence was a cancer, one that made Jean toss and turn and wish for morning, even though she knew she’d perpetually face it with swollen eyes and tired limbs.
    But she slept in the bed at home immeasurably better than she did in the hotel bed. It wasn’t just the bed, which, true enough, felt like a medieval back-straightening device, or the pillow, which sank all the way to the hard mattress if she so much as put a breath’s worth of weight against it, but it was the realization that this was the first time she’d ever been in a hotel room alone.
    At first she’d tried pretending Wayne was in the bathroom, heat light glaring down on him as he took one of his long “vacation showers.” She even got up and turned on the bathroom light, then shut the door, just for the strip of light stretching from under the door across the floor. How many times had she fallen asleep to that light? Colorado, Omaha, Branson, even right here in St. Louis (but not Yellowstone—never Yellowstone). The kids would be snoring softly in their shared bed next to her, the scent of hotel pool chlorine lingering in the room, the window air-conditioning unit rumbling like a jet through the darkness, anticipation of the next day’s adventures heavy in the air. They’d shared so many great times on those vacations. The kids were always too excited to argue, having too much fun to throw fits. And on every vacation, up until Laura went off to college, Jean had always made it a point to do something “girly” with her—get a manicure or visit a doll museum or just go shopping without the boys. It had been such fun. Laura had been such a fun child, even in her precise way.
    Jean tossed and turned, the light not helping, and ultimately decided to call Loretta, though it was decidedly past Chuck’s bedtime (Chuck used the “bed” in “bedtime” loosely—most nights he sacked out in his worn recliner, leaving poor Loretta with a stack of inspirational but unrequited Flavian Munney romance novels by her bedside). Loretta answered on the second ring.
    “Well, I’d started to think I was going to have to check the ditches on I-70. You got ketchup packets in your glove box?”
    Jean laughed. Her friend never could just answer with a simple hello. “Ketchup packets?”
    “To survive on in case you’re trapped for days in a tree.”
    “How would my car end up in a tree? It’s not a hovercraft.”
    “Exactly. No one would think to look for you up there. How is she?”
    Jean sighed, closing her eyes to keep from