The Myth of You and Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

him, that we were doing fine. “He’s doing fine now,” she said, “but what are you going to do if he falls in the middle of the night? He’s an old man.”
    “If you put him in that place, you’ll kill him,” I said.
    That was when her face flushed red. She looked away from me for a moment, and when she looked back her expression was hard, her voice steely. “You’ve been very good to him,” she said. “But I’m his family.”
    “Yes, but I . . .”
    “You’re not his family,” she said. She kept her gaze fixed on me. How did she know this was the way to win the argument, the worst thing she could have said? She was right. For a little while I had forgotten.
    Oliver had found me in my room an hour later. I was sitting cross-legged in the window seat, thinking about where I could go if I left here. I’d lived so many places already, it seemed to me in that hour that I had exhausted all the possibilities. Because I could not retrace my steps, I’d simply have to disappear. A little out of breath, Oliver said my name, and I started. “How did you get up the stairs?”
    He grinned at me. “I crawled.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and took a deep breath. “She’s gone, you’ll be happy to know.”
    I nodded.
    “I heard what she said to you,” Oliver said. “I’m sorry.”
    “She’s right,” I said. “She’s your family.”
    He nodded. “She is,” he said. “Get up now. Help me down the stairs.” I obeyed. As we made our way down the stairs he clutched my arm like I was the only thing keeping him upright. I started to lead him to his recliner, but he stopped me. He pointed down the hall toward the genealogy room.
    “Was somebody born?” I asked. He gave me a mysterious smile.
    We stood in the center of the room for a moment. He was leaning heavily on me, and I thought guiltily of my argument with Ruth. Maybe I couldn’t take care of Oliver. Maybe my desire to keep him here was two parts concern, two parts selfishness. “So,” he said. “What do you think?”
    “What do I think about what?”
    He sighed impatiently and pointed at the family tree. I walked us both closer to it. He pointed to his own name. There, he had added another branch beside the one that led to Ruth, and above it he had written my name. I stared at it, stunned, tears starting in my eyes. “Oliver,” I finally managed to say.
    He patted my hand. “I know you have your own family,” he said. “But I wanted you to know you belong here, too.”
    “Thank you,” I said. I turned to him. “Ruth’s going to be pissed.”
    He gave me his wicked grin. “I know,” he said. “Why do you think I did it?”
    “How did you get this down by yourself?”
    “I just pretend to be a weak old man,” he said. “So you’ll let me lean on you awhile.”
    I looked around the room, at shelf after shelf of carefully bound pages, list after list of names. I wiped tears from my eyes. “Are you ever going to tell me what all this stuff is for?”
    He sighed, serious again. “I had this idea, a long time ago, of making a family tree that connected everyone.
The
family tree. I knew even at the time that it was impossible. It’s like trying to map every star in the universe.”
    “But you started collecting them anyway.”
    He shrugged. “My dear, I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t bear to think of them languishing in used-book stores, unless the Mormons took them to save some souls. This is my way of saving souls. Making sure they’re not forgotten.” He pulled from the shelf a booklet with yellow construction-paper covers, opened it, and ran one finger down a list of names. “Susannah Waverly Howse,” he read. Then he smiled at me. “See?”
    “Susannah Waverly Howse,” I repeated.
    “That’s right,” he said. “Now someone remembers her name.”
     
     
    I found Oliver , at last, in the parlor, a room we rarely used, dark and heavily furnished in what he described as “the great-grandmother