The Realm of Last Chances Read Online Free PDF

formerly belonged to their grandmother. The hot-water faucet was gone from the second-floor bathtub, and the only way you could turn it on was to twist the stem with the pliers that lay on the windowsill. The toilet handle in the half bath was broken, though you could flush it manually by pulling the top off the tank, sticking your hand in and lifting the stopper. Two boards on the back porch had rotted clean through, the drain in the kitchen sink kept backing up and disgorging some kind of soupy substance that stank to high heaven, all the light fixtures were so full of dead insects you could sometimes hear their bodies frying. Angie and Lexa had evidently painted quite a picture, making the house sound like the one Herman Munster’s family occupied.
    In the far corner of the deli’s back room, there was an enormous reach-in freezer that had three doors and could have held a huge amount of frozen food, except for one thing: it didn’t work. It hadn’t for at least twenty years, according to Frankie, but he’d never gotten rid of it because it wouldn’t fit through the opening into the front room; it had been there in 1984 when his father renovated, and nobody considered the possibility that it might ever quit and need to be removed. Matt focused on that freezer now as a means of keeping himself anchored. Lately, he felt insubstantial, weightless, as if he were merely the idea of a person rather than the real thing. People weren’t just a past or a present or a set of extinguished expectations. They had to have a future, too, and for himself he failed to see one. He felt as if he could readily be brushed off, as if right now, should he choose to, Nowicki could swat him aside as if he were no more momentous than a fly or a gnat.
    “Matt?” Paul said. “You know I don’t mean to offend you, right? I’m just trying to call attention to the problem because … well, it really bothers Carla. So, look, if you’d like to come over after closing time and get some stuff for the place—some faucets, maybe, and a handle for that toilet, a few cans of outdoor latex, some drain opener, insecticide, whatever—I’ve got ’em, and they’re yours. Hell, I even have lumber. I could help you do whatever needs doing to that back porch.”
    There had been a time when Matt Drinnan could talk his way out of almost any jam, when explanations and justifications and complex and simple evasions came to him so easily it got boring. Then one morning, in the basement of the Harvard Book Emporium, surrounded by millions upon millions of words, he tapped his own verbal reservoir and found it empty. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say that day, and he couldn’t think of a single thing to say now.
    The silence took as much of a toll on the other man as it did on him. Finally, Nowicki reached out and wrapped a massive arm around him, whispering, “Jesus, Matt, I’m sorry.”

 
    their first few years together , Kristin knew nothing about Cal’s father. Then she learned enough not to want to find out more.
    While his father had never served in the military, he used the word “ground” like a real soldier. Cal had reached this conclusion in a Sacramento metroplex in the fall of 1993. He was there to watch the movie
Gettysburg
, and his moment of revelation came when Major General George G. Meade, played by Richard Anderson, arrived at a gathering of Union officers on the evening of the battle’s first day. Addressing Brian Mallon, who played Winfield S. Hancock, Meade asked, “Is this good ground, General?” To which Hancock raised an eyebrow and replied, “
Very
good ground.” They saw it as a place where their side could slaughter the opponents rather than suffering it themselves, and that was how his father must have viewed any number of properties as he drove around the northeastern edges of Bakersfield in the midseventies, gazing out the truck window at one tract or another barren but for the occasional manzanita.