Read Online All I Have in This World by Michael Parker - Free Book Online

morning to find the tarp as taut as he’d tied it back at the farm.
    â€œTell you the truth, it’d be best to wait till tomorrow. It’s not that far from here but the hike in will take you at least an hour. You wouldn’t want to get lost and be stumbling around in that terrain after dark.”
    Tomorrow he might have changed his mind and be well into Chihuahua. He nodded at the park ranger in a way that suggested he’d take his advice, and left armed with a back-of-a-napkin map. Only later, when he was on the road, did Marcus realize that, aside from the brief and awkward exchange with the desk clerk, this was the only real conversation he’d had with another person in weeks. But two miles outside town, as he crested a hill and spotted a herd of pronghorn antelope springing away from him through high grassland, Marcus had the strangest feeling that soon he would no longer need to cut himself off from everyone he had ever loved and those foolhardy enough to love him back.

Brazil, Indiana, 1983
    Courtney could tell her mother was terrified of the double-decker truck carrying a load of cars on its back by the way she sat up in the driver’s seat of the Astro—too straight, the same way she drove when it rained, or when she had to get on the interstate. Courtney’s mother hated to drive and had learned how only a month ago, when Courtney’s father made her. Mainly her mother had to get her license so she could drive Courtney to see the doctor in Indianapolis. Courtney had a hole in her heart. It wasn’t a big deal, but usually such holes closed on their own and Courtney was eleven and still had her hole in her heart, so she had to go to the doctor every month for chest X-rays and sometimes EKGs, and her father could not take a day off work every month.
    â€œElaine, you’ve got to learn,” he said, not one night at dinner but many nights, nightly, it seemed, for years.
    But her mother said, “I will not do it. I am not a good driver.”
    â€œAnd you know this how?” her father said. Courtney pretended not to listen but in fact she thought her father’s question pertinent if not obvious and she might have asked it herself, though she understood that her mother would probably not even acknowledge the question if put to her by an eleven-year-old girl. It was like her mother didn’t have to acknowledge it, even if the question involved the welfare of her eleven-year-old girl.
    Her mother put her fork down. “When I was in high school,” she said, “everyone I knew claimed to have dreamt that they were driving. Before they got their learner’s permit, I mean. And I would ask them about their dreams, which is not something I would have done in any other circumstances, because frankly, listening to people recount their dreams bores me to the bone. But I would always ask about their driving dreams because I never had one, never ever. And everyone else did.”
    â€œSometimes you don’t remember your dreams,” said Courtney. “That doesn’t mean you don’t dream, though.”
    â€œSo you’re saying that because you never dreamed about driving, that’s your excuse for never getting your license?” Courtney’s dad said.
    Courtney noticed how her father bit into the word “dreamed,” as if to highlight how affected her mother’s “dreamt” was.
    â€œIt’s not an excuse,” said her mother. “It’s a reason. There is a difference.”
    â€œGod Almighty,” said Courtney’s father. Sometimes when he was exasperated, he said, “Hell’s bells.” She loved it when he said, “Hell’s bells.”
    â€œWhat did you dream about?” Courtney asked her mother, because suddenly her mother, who usually seemed far away and short and indifferently attired, as if a sheriff’s car had, deep in the night, trolled the neighborhood and some deputy had