The Grievers Read Online Free PDF

over my head. It was a variation on Neil’s earlier suggestion of shimmying out the bottom, but if he took notice of this fact, he didn’t let on.
    “I still think there’s more,” Neil said. “Something you’re trying to avoid.”
    “Please,” I said. “You’ve been spending too much time with Madeline.”
    “I wish,” Neil said.
    “Too much time with her books, then. Do you feel like getting lunch?”
    “I need to get back to work,” Neil said, already turning away.
    “No,” I said. “I mean, wait. This is important.”
    Neil stopped and let out a sigh, then turned as if to ask what I wanted—or, more to the point, what I wanted this time .
    “It’s about Billy.”

    P ILLS HE could almost see, Neil said as we picked at tuna salad sandwiches and sipped iced tea in a booth at a chain restaurant in the strip mall across the street from the bank where I worked. Going to sleep and never waking up was one thing, but jumping from a bridge?
    “Telling your legs to do this thing,” he said. “That last second. I can only imagine.”
    “I don’t want to think about it,” I said.
    “I went up in a helicopter once. You look down, and your bones freeze. You can’t move a muscle.”
    My glittery dollar sign lay next to our table like an abandoned prop from The Price Is Right . Whenever I moved it or shoved it into the backseat of my car or slipped in the mud, a few sequins would flake off, but so far, the costume wasn’t looking too bad—for a giant, glittery dollar sign, anyway. The only problem was that the costume made me look like a joke wherever I went, and I wasn’t in much of a mood for joking.
    “Do you remember New Year’s Eve?” I said.
    “Which part?” Neil said. “Packer hitting on Karen or you grabbing Madeline’s ass?”
    “That was an accident,” I said.
    “You don’t grab someone’s ass by accident,” Neil said. “Especially when your wife is standing right next to her.”
    “That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “What would possess me to grab your wife’s ass when Karen was standing right there? If I really wanted to grab Madeline’s ass, wouldn’t I have waited until we were alone?”
    “I don’t know,” Neil said. “You do a lot of things that don’t make a whole lot of sense lately.”
    “This isn’t about me,” I said. “It’s about Billy. Did you see his wrist or not?”
    “No,” Neil said. “I didn’t.”
    “Well I did, and I didn’t say anything.”
    Neil chewed on the inside of his lip, and our waitress breezed by the table to ask if everything was okay. Almost in unison, Neil and I turned to the woman and said that everything was great. Delicious, Neil added, though he’d barely touched his sandwich. In my mind, I thanked her for not asking any questions about my giant dollar sign, and in real life I asked for another glass of iced tea.
    “He was hardly there,” I said, looking away from Neil. “On the night of the party, he left after twenty minutes.”
    “He was in a bad place,” Neil said.
    “His fingers were so skinny,” I said. “I remember thinking that. I remember looking at his hands and thinking that his fingers were so skinny, so bony, and then seeing the stitches in his wrist and not saying anything.”
    “You couldn’t have known,” Neil said.
    I raised my eyebrows. “Stitches in his wrist? What else could it have meant? He spent the whole time telling me that he was going back to school for computers. Twenty minutes of this, and then he stopped and apologized and asked if he could use the phone, and all I could think about was how glad I was that he finally stopped talking.”
    “Who did he call?” Neil asked.
    “His mother,” I said. “She dropped him off at the party and came home to a ringing phone.”
    “She told you this?”
    “She told me a lot of things.”
    “Like what?”
    I shook my head. “He got off the phone and said he had plans. I knew it was a lie, but I let it go. It was the last time I