The Truth About Celia Read Online Free PDF Page A

to tighten and a terrible heat to roll through the soles of his feet. It feels as though something inside him is wobbling just at the point of collapse, like a bead of water immediately before it spills out of itself. He is a mess. He stops by the door of the Why Not Bar, pressing his hand to his gut, and waits for the sensation to crest and fade away. Rollie Onopa calls out to him from the roof, where he is replacing a line of rain-rotted shingles. He says that he and the wife and the daughter will be there this evening for sure, they wouldn’t miss it, he just wants to let Christopher know, and Christopher says that he appreciates it. I’ll see you later on tonight, then, Christopher calls to him, and Rollie says, You can count on it.
    Rollie takes another few nails from the box as Christopher swallows his breath and pushes on toward the car. He squares one beneath the hammer and holds the other three in his mouth like toothpicks. Since there are no more joggers on the street, he knocks the nail into the shingle with a gentle tap, then drives it through with one easy swing. He takes a clean muscular pride in his facility with tools, in sawing smoothly through the kinks in a block of wood or whipping a spare lump of mortar off his trowel. He remembers his father telling him that the best men in the world knew how to use a tool, that Jesus Himself was a carpenter and you can be damn sure that when He fixed the joint in a door, that joint was by God perfect. Whenever Rollie spots joggers running below him, he likes to hammer in time with their footfalls. The way they stare at their feet trying to figure out what’s going on always amuses him. He certainly confused the hell out of the one who passed a few minutes ago, that schoolteacher. He lays another shingle on the roof. His daughter means everything to him, and he doesn’t know what he would do if he were to lose her. He can’t imagine how Christopher manages to get out of bed in the morning, to drive into town, to buy eyedrops and envelopes as though nothing has happened. After he has nailed the shingle in place, he stands and stretches into the sunlight, a single pearl of sweat sliding down his back. From the roof of the bar the road through town looks like an ascending chain of stoplights, falling green one by one, and just before he bends to his knees again he sees Christopher’s car disappearing over the brow of the hill.
    The traffic is light, and Christopher drives home as quickly as he can. A Styrofoam cup stirs and lifts behind a schoolbus, tumbling over his hood, and he watches it sail smartly into a telephone pole. He is preparing himself for his daughter’s memorial service. When he gets home he takes a pair of the antacids he bought, washing them down with a glass of ginger ale, which a school nurse once told him was good for soothing the stomach. He does not believe that Celia is dead. He does not even believe that she is not coming back. She simply vanished one day, when she was seven years old, and they have not been able to find her.
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t
know where to find them.
When she was a toddler, this was her favorite nursery rhyme. Christopher used to recite it to her every night before she went to sleep, leaning over her bed’s protective railing to kiss her good night. Lately he hears its bobbing cadence in his head a dozen times a day. He has even begun to match his stride to it. His wife, Janet, is upstairs in their bedroom sifting through the closet, and the sound of the wire hangers scraping along the metal rod, the empty ones tinkling loosely together, sounds to him like a wind chime combined with a rotary saw. The memorial service was Janet’s idea. Several weeks ago the two of them were having an argument about books that became an argument about Celia that became an argument about when he was going to climb free of it. He does not believe that he will ever climb free of it. He is not ready to memorialize