This Given Sky Read Online Free PDF

Ate dinner with his folks. They talked about the weather. After dessert, as he walked back into the kitchen from the bathroom, he heard his parents whisper “. . . not for us to say .” He guessed they were talking about Diane, loudly proclaimed that he was ready to help with the dishes.

    Grady
    After they turned on the dishwasher, Jake and his mother stood in the kitchen, looked not at each other or at his father sitting in the living room thumbing the remote as he pretended to care about surfing the TV channels.
    “I think I’ll go out,” said Jake. Natural, my voice sounds natural .
    Jake parked on the quiet Main Street. Walked into the Tap Room. No customers. Steve stood behind the bar. The jukebox played old Springsteen.
    Something besides relief and joy lit Steve’s face: “There he is!”
    Jake met him behind the bar and grabbed him for a hug. He’s holding on like I’m leaving, not come home . On the shelf in front of the bar mirror waited a shot glass full of amber whiskey.
    Jake said: “Looks like you started without me.”
    “Won’t drink that one,” said Steve. “Pour it, leave it on the dare. But I won’t drink it, not going to be a blues drunk.”
    He nodded for puzzled Jake to walk back around the bar, take a stool.
    “But I do drink for happy,” said Steve. “I’ll drink to celebrate.”
    He poured them two fresh whiskeys, clinked his glass to Jake’s: “Here’s to you. Glad you made it back, great to see you, good . . .”
    He trailed off. Swallowed his words with whiskey.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Thel left me.” Steve shook his head. “Or I guess I left her. She’s in the house; I’m back on Len’s couch.”
    “But I thought you two . . .”
    Steve frowned. “You thought so too . I wondered about that.”
    “You’re not making sense.”
    “I don’t get to make sense, I just get what I can.” Steve shrugged. “When the war ends, she starts walking around our new house like she was looking for a door. Told her I’d move out, give her space or walk away if that’s what she wants. She says she doesn’t know what she wants. When I asked if I should stay, she said nothing, which is the same as saying go .”
    Behind Steve, Jake saw his own reflection in the bar mirror.
    Steve said: “Figure you’re my brother. What we got, our posse . . . Nobody’s fault. Whatever happens, there’s always you and me.”
    The jukebox fell silent.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jake.
    “Sure you do.” Steve splayed his hands on the bar to lean close. “If you don’t, it’s ’cause you don’t want to. You gotta be braver than that.”
    Steve stood straight. “Me, too.”
    He angled his head toward the rear wall, dumped a clatter of coins from the tip jar on the bar into his hand. “I gotta go play the music.”
    Steve walked to the back of the bar and kept his back to Jake.
    Jake walked out to the street.
    Don’t look back .
    Driving from Main Street to Knob Hill took five minutes. These are the streets that sent me into life. Still the same, completely different, never knew them like I thought I did . He flowed past houses full of secrets no one would ever tell him, strangers he’d never meet. He’d walked this way to grade school, that way to the swimming pool. Jake drove past the mouth of the alley he’d run out of with Steve to get to Thel’s that first day in 1975, at the end of the 10,000 day war in Vietnam. Drive on by tonight, 1991, when he fought a whole war in forty-four days. Drive on. Get to where you’re going.
    But he stopped half a block away in the silent street light darkness. Smelled the sweaty mustiness of his road-tripped Mustang. Whiskey singed the dry taste in his mouth. He felt the weight of the stars.
    That house : basement plus one story of white walls under a dark roof with a picture window glow from the inside light hinting somebody’s home .
    Just looking at that house like: this changes everything .
    Jake climbed the