The Dream Life of Astronauts Read Online Free PDF

guess not,” he said, as if my coming along was an option and he was choosing not to take it.
    For a long time—a year, maybe—I stayed mad at him for that. Then one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me that of course he couldn’t have taken me with him. That would have been kidnapping. It would have enraged my father and upset my mother; it might even have been on the news—a manhunt involving the police, private detectives, witnesses who’d spotted us, and a team of FBI agents laying siege to the southernmost port in the country, just as my uncle and I were about to board a boat bound for Cuba. I had to stay; he had to go. Three years later, he sent a postcard from Prague, addressed to the family (“
Pozdravy!—
Robbie” was all it said). By then, my mother was gone, too: back to Ohio, where she got a job in a department store and called every couple of weeks—sometimes drunk, sometimes not—to talk to me, not to my father, and where she eventually married a fat man who had twin sons from another marriage, and where I had to start going for a month in the summers and hated every minute of it, and where she hugged and kissed me over and over again every time she had to put me on the plane back to Florida. I was in college when the fat man dropped dead. I didn’t fly to Ohio for the funeral, even though both she and my father offered to buy my ticket, and I don’t think she ever forgave me for that. But she came to my wedding, and she gave an impromptu speech at the rehearsal dinner that was kind-spirited, meandering, and, ultimately, incomprehensible. My father, at the far end of the table, had been about to speak, but he kept his eyes on his plate as she prattled on, and I saw him slip his notes back into the pocket of his suit coat. I wished, of all things, that Robbie could have been there. But Robbie and my mother had had a long-distance falling-out sometime during her second marriage, and she didn’t want me trying to track him down. Anyway, it would have made him sad to see what she had become, which wasn’t so different from what she’d always been. As for my father, he’d stopped drinking years ago. He’d switched over from real estate to life insurance. He hated Carter, voted for Reagan, voted for the first Bush but not the second one. He never remarried. We spoke once a week on the phone—about politics, the weather, his arthritis—until just after his seventy-third birthday, when he went to sleep one night, and that was it. I had to call my mother, of course. She surprised me by weeping.

C lark Evans finished his talk on his NASA experience with a description of the g-forces created in a Darmotech centrifuge. He held one of his large hands open in front of him, as if displaying a work of wonder, and then moved the hand in a circle that increased in speed as he described the sensation. Frankie, staring from the front row, felt nearly hypnotized.
    The wheat-haired librarian who was moderating the event asked if anyone had a question for their guest. Frankie raised his hand. There were five people in the audience, scattered over a flock of twenty folding chairs. The librarian and Clark Evans sat on slightly nicer chairs at the front of the library’s map room. She looked right past Frankie and pointed a wavering finger at an old man wearing a sun visor.
    “Did you find being on the moon made you want to throw up?”
    “Well, as I was saying—” Clark Evans began.
    “The reason I ask is because Conrad, or maybe Bean—one of those guys from Apollo 12 or 14—said in an interview that the low gravity made him nauseous, and I was wondering what would happen if an astronaut threw up in his suit.”
    “I imagine that would be quite a mess,” Evans replied.
    “But it didn’t happen to you?”
    “Not to me, no. As I was saying a while back, I was lined up for three different missions, but they didn’t come through. NASA politics and whatnot. But I can tell you from knowing a whole lot of