Trust Me Read Online Free PDF

at the target two stories below. When the boxes hit, they exploded, throwing a spray of dice, tokens, counters, and cards into the air and across the lawn. A box called Mousetrap, its lid showing laughing children gathered around a Rube Goldbergdevice, drifted sideways, struck one side wall of the truck, and spilled its plastic components into a flower bed. A set of something called Drag Race! floated gently as a snowflake before coming to rest, much diminished, on a stained mattress. Foster saw in the depth of downward space the cause of his melancholy: he had not played enough with these games. Now no one wanted to play.
    Had he and his wife avoided divorce, of course, these boxes would have continued to gather dust in an undisturbed attic, their sorrow unexposed. The toys of his own childhood still rested in his mother’s attic. At his last visit, he had crept up there and wound the spring of a tin Donald Duck; it had responded with an angry clack of its bill and a few stiff strokes on its drum. A tilted board with concentric grooves for marbles still waited in a bushel basket with his alphabet blocks and lead airplanes—waited for his childhood to return.
    His ex-wife paused where he squatted at the attic window and asked him, “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing. These games weren’t used much.”
    “I know. It happens fast. You better stop now; it’s making you too sad.”
    Behind him, his family had cleaned out the attic; the slant-ceilinged rooms stood empty, with drooping insulation. “How can you bear it?” he asked, of the emptiness.
    “Oh, it’s fun,” she said, “once you get into it. Off with the old, on with the new. The new people seem nice. They have
little
children.”
    He looked at her and wondered whether she was being brave or truly hardhearted. The attic trembled slightly. “That’s Ted,” she said.
    She had acquired a boy friend, a big athletic accountant fleeing from domestic embarrassments in a neighboring town. When Ted slammed the kitchen door two stories below, the glass shade of a kerosene lamp that, though long unused, Foster hadn’t had the heart to throw out of the window vibrated in its copper clips, emitting a thin note like a trapped wasp’s song. Time for Foster to go. His dusty knees creaked when he stood. His ex-wife’s eager steps raced ahead of him down through the emptied house. He followed, carrying the lamp, and set it finally on the bare top of a bookcase he had once built, on the first-floor landing. He remembered screwing the top board, a prize piece of knot-free pine, into place from underneath, so not a nailhead marred its smoothness.
    After all the vacant rooms and halls, the kitchen seemed indecently full of heat and life. “Dad, want a beer?” the bearded son asked. “Ted brought some.” The back of the boy’s hand, holding forth the dewy can, blazed with fine ginger hairs. His girl friend, wearing gypsy earrings and a NO NUKES sweatshirt, leaned against the disconnected stove, her hair in a bandanna and a black smirch becomingly placed on one temple. From the kind way she smiled at Foster, he felt this party was making room for him.
    “No, I better go.”
    Ted shook Foster’s hand, as he always did. He had thin pink skin and silver hair whose fluffy waves seemed mechanically induced. Foster could look him in the eye no longer than he could gaze at the sun. He wondered how such a radiant brute had got into such a tame line of work. Ted had not helped with the attic today because he had been off in his old town, visiting his teen-aged twins. “I hear you did a splendid job today,” he announced.
    “They did,” Foster said. “I wasn’t much use. I just sat there stunned. All these things I had forgotten buying.”
    “Some were presents,” his son reminded him. He passed the can his father had snubbed to his mother, who took it and tore up the tab with that defiant-sounding
pssff
. She had never liked beer, yet tipped the can to her