The Push & the Pull Read Online Free PDF Page A

Stan’s walker chucked into the sloshing lake.
    Returning to his dad, to reality, he found Stan grinning like a pea-shooter champ. “Okay, big boy, ante up.”
    â€œYou just missed a Samaritan offering his services,” Stan said. “Nice guy, stepped out of the crowd to check on me while you were gone, but he’d caught me midstream. I could barely utter a word. My eyelids must have been fluttering.” Stan went on to make astronaut jokes and request another beer.

12
    The students, their grandparents die. Betty and Andrew hadn’t been together for six weeks when her father, Jim, phoned unexpectedly one night, early in the fall term, to say that her grandfather had died. Betty had tried to return the phone to its cradle, had planned on shutting a bedroom door or catching some air in the backyard, but there was Andrew, his arms enshrouding hers. He said something, but she just concentrated on the feel of his voice, the deep buzz of it against her cheek. He was kissing her hairline and temple, kissing beside those small tears. Neither of them could have predicted that, at least temporarily, he’d appreciate the death.
    â€œMy dad’s all alone out there,” she said. “At least, I think he is. Even at the best of times he’ll go two weeks without even going in for groceries.”
    â€œSo let’s go,” Andrew said, proposing that they drive immediately to her dad’s isolated and distant lake house.
    Her tears shifted gears, the last few stumbling out with a kind of relief. By the time they had piled into his car with their sweaters and loose pants, with their quiet CDs and their Thermos of heavily milked coffee, death rolled around like an unseen marble, small but hard, knocking in the corners. The smile they traded in the dashboard light stretched for miles, allowed them to share the dark night like a blanket. If they hadn’t had to stop for earplugs, he would surely have kept his hands on the wheel.
    Thirty minutes into the intended three-hour drive, he’d been thinking that a long night drive was the emotional equivalent of alcohol, fuelling not just lust but love, when some part of the muffler dissolved or tore away and loosed the car’s latent snarl. In a stroke, the compact sedan became a pack of Harleys, a laden B-52. Their music was lost to the engine’s roar. The singer, not their muffler, seemed to fall off behind them.
    Eyebrows shot up and chins dipped in alarm. He had to raise hisvoice, “I was literally about to say, if only we could drive like this all night.”
    â€œYeah,” she yelled back, “me too. . . . Are we going to explode?”
    â€œAny minute now.”
    The roar was constant, inescapable, an oil spill. Music was stripped to faint, insectile percussion. “This is what a car really is,” he tried to say, meaning
the true machine
or
shouldn’t we admit to this
, but his yell carried only data, beat him back into a mute cave. Twenty minutes ago, they’d been a bubble, a speeding island of grin and stroke. Now, each minute in the roar pushed them further apart, raised a Berlin Wall between them, tolled the bell for Grandpa.
    â€œWe’ll pass Peterborough soon,” he announced. “I think we should look for earplugs.”
    â€œYeah. Okay.”
    â€œEarplugs and a snack?”
    New to death and how reliable the body’s hungers can be, Betty replied, “Yes, surprisingly. Yes.”
    Leaving the highway, hunting out a late-night pharmacy and then an open restaurant, they were almost an hour before they returned to the rebellious car.
    â€œIn ways, I don’t feel like we’re going anywhere,” she said, turning to survey the strange dark town around them. “Just driving.”
    Back in the car, both chins tilted toward the outside shoulder, then the inner, for a shy insertion of the pharmacy’s foam plug. As the plugs began their conical expansion, he was