Read Online And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass - Free Book Online

soon as his stepfather made light of her disappointment, what a mistake he’d made.
    “Five months of the year I take my
life
in my
hands
on that drive—the mud and the sleet and the snow. I do that to make this family possible! I want this family to
stay
possible.” Was she threatening that somehow it wouldn’t?
    Jasper and Kit looked at their plates; for the first time, with a stunning surge of guilty pleasure, Kit was aware of a distinct alliance between them.
    Jasper reached toward Kit’s mother, laying a hand over hers. In the nicked, sun-spotted skin of his stepfather’s massive hand as it engulfed his mother’s fine fingers with their painted nails, Kit recognized something else: the acute difference between his mother and her husband—not just in age but in the habits and passions that had shaped those hands. “This family,” said Jasper, “wouldn’t be much of a family with you two gone half the time, now would it?”
    Kit’s mother shook her head, though it wasn’t clear if she was disagreeing with Jasper or trying to shake free the delusion that her idea would “simplify” anything at all.
    “I bet there’s a plum job for you somewhere in this neck of the woods,” suggested Jasper. “All your experience, that’s got to be golden.”
    “All my experience is what gives me the seniority I have where I’m teaching now.
That
I am not giving up. And forget the problem of reciprocity between states. None of the schools here have the funding that makes my job what it is. You know that. The arts are diddly-squat out here in the boonies.”
    Kit stared at her, but she was focused entirely on Jasper. She seemed to have forgotten Kit was there, too. Was she saying that his art classes, his art teacher, his drawings and cartoons, were “diddly-squat”?
    They ate in silence for a time, until the hostess—yet another past pupil of Ski Bum Number One—stopped by to ask Jasper what brand of hiking boots she should buy as a birthday present for her son.
    And so, over the next three years, their routines remained the same, though now, at least through the cooler seasons, only the three of them shared the house—which made it seem larger, colder, and more a place of separate privacies than open-aired, communal living. Over these years, Kit discovered sex (with the admiring Madeleine) and the pleasure of being just the right degree of drunk. In Jasper’s beat-up Rover, he learned to drive. He learned to paint with oils and sculpt wood. He made a few pieces of thick but useful furniture. In his sophomore year, he failed chemistry (retaking it over the following summer), but he won an award in a juried art show for students from all across the state. The following winter, he helped Jasper train their first team of sled dogs, to add another tourist attraction to the business. For good money, he helped a friend of Jasper’s build a tool-shed and a sugarhouse. Over these years, it was Jasper’s approval and praise he sought, more than his mother’s.
    But Kit and Jasper weren’t close, or not in any singular way. With Rory and Kyle weaned (as their father put it)—Kyle at the University of Vermont; Rory leaving college, midway through, to teach Outward Bound in Colorado—Jasper still cooked breakfasts and dinners, but in those margins of time when he and Kit were alone together, Kit’s mother on the road or working late, he did not make much effort toward fatherly small talk. He kept a weather radio on at all times, sometimes stopping in the midst of an indoor task (caulking a drafty seam on one of the many windows; filling the firewood bin; unpacking groceries) to listen and comment on approaching changes.
    “Sunny weekend, there you have it. Bonanza.”
    “That’s not what the barometric pressure tells me, buster.”
    “Two feet of powder, Santa: that’s right there at the top of my list.”
    Kit began to do his homework at the kitchen table rather than up in his chilly room. Jasper’s periodic