Read Online A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis - Free Book Online

enjoy these little visits of ours. I really look forward to them a lot, you can’t imagine. Time sure does fly and it’s too bad you have to go.”
    â€œI...” began Lowell as his hand was shaken faster and faster, as though caught in some sort of soft, painless mechanism.
    â€œDon’t think you have to pretend you enjoyed it,” said Leo. “I talk too much. Believe me, I know my limitations like a book. I’m talking too much right now. I bet you can’t wait to get out of here. This is a good time for it. The sun is still up and there’s a lot of light outside. If you stayed any longer I’d run out of things to say and we’d just have to sit there. It’s been good seeing you.”
    â€œYes,” said Lowell. “Good-bye,” he called out to the kitchen, where his mother-in-law lurked out of sight, motionless and apparently not breathing. Nine years had passed, but she still hadn’t told him what to call her, and neither had anybody else. It would have been awkward if Lowell had been trying to attract her attention in a crowd, but he didn’t think he would ever want to do that. “So long,” he called. “We’re going now.”
    â€œI heard you,” she said.
    â€œEr, heh,” said Leo, trying to shrug, smile, and look over his shoulder at the same time, giving such a look of toothy terror that there might have been an armed fugitive concealed behind the door.
    â€œGood-bye, Poppa,” said Lowell’s wife.
    Moving against the grain of the day, they went down the hall and got into the elevator. Out on the street, people were getting out of cars with presents and small children, but Lowell’s evening was already in the wrong place.
    Lowell hadn’t planned on his in-laws when he came to New York. In a dim, haphazard way he’d known that Flatbush was somewhere nearby, more or less the same way that he knew there were stockyards in Chicago, but it had never occurred to him that he would actually have to go there. Nor had it ever occurred that going there would, in a curious and disturbing way, constitute by far the largest part of a very, very small social life. A lot of things hadn’t occurred to him. He was paying for them now. Sometimes he wondered if he was even paying for things he didn’t know about.
    â€œI thought we were going to Berkeley,” his wife had said nine years ago, her voice coming to him down the corridor of years as clearly as if she had spoken to him only a moment before. It was the instant when his life had suddenly poised itself on an idle remark, and the hinge of fate had opened—a small moment, an utterly insignificant fragment of time that could have passed as swiftly as turning a page in a book, but instead it had changed his life forever. “Didn’t you say we were going to Berkeley?” she asked anxiously. “That’s where I want to go. All those pretty hills. I guess you’re kidding about New York, right? Berkeley is where we’re really going, isn’t it? We’re really going there, aren’t we? Lowell?”
    He could still hear the voice, he could still see the room, he could still smell the old green overstuffed chair he’d been sitting in. “Maybe not,” he said. He was only teasing. Berkeley was definitely the place they were going, and the idea of going to New York instead had just sort of wandered into his mind a moment ago like a stray insect. No doubt it would have perished there at once if he hadn’t spoken it aloud. Now it was out in the open, and God help them all. Even in those days his wife had an almost marvelous tendency to seize upon and circle a vagrant or distasteful idea, trying all the variations until some sort of conclusion could be drawn from it. Occasionally these conclusions took bizarre and astonishing form, such as going to New York when you really intended to go to Berkeley, but in those days