Read Online Giovanni's Gift by Bradford Morrow - Free Book Online Page B

giddy months we spent together—for many years. It was what some people refer to as a glimpse, this moment. Here, now, the loyal guilt quilt had lifted, so that I sensed maybe there was something possible for me, that I might start anew, invent someone fresh in this body of mine, here in this place which no one whom I had ever harmed called home. Maybe, I thought, there could be life after Mary. Maybe I could find some way to reassemble all these tangents into some kind of coherent existence.
    Even for the illusion, I was saturated with gratitude. I paid my bill, left a tip on the table, said goodbye to May, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The clock on the bank read eight. Already, the town was quite alive with people. May, Mary—May’s name was Mary, but shy one crucial, growling letter—it wasn’t long before she and the hope I’d been feeling were gently erased.
    Henry, not Edmé, retrieved me from my muddled musings. “That’s all you brought?” he asked, swinging my leather bag into the back of the car. “That’s it,” and I climbed in beside him, and we took off for Ash Creek.
    â€œYou look well,” my uncle glanced at me sidelong.
    â€œI do?”
    â€œYou could use a haircut. Other than that—”
    â€œYou look well yourself,” twisting my hair, which did hang down to my shoulders.
    â€œYou’ve got to be tired. Edmé’s making up your room.”
    â€œThanks for letting me stay on such short notice—I mean, on no notice.”
    â€œWe’re always happy to have you, Grant. You know that.”
    The conversation continued along these simple lines, my uncle and I never having developed over the years much skill at make-talk.
    As we spoke, I marveled at what I saw outside the window.
    The sun was higher now. It spread a lazy light across the wide valley, a vast moraine many millennia ago and now a fertile expanse of green crisscrossed by serpentine glacial streams. Small hanging glaciers and sparkly ice faces clung to shadowy crevices and gullies in the highest ranges surrounding this great bowl. Snow that never melted, centuries-old slush. Magpies alit on barbed wiring. Cattle grazed in the distance. The world was constituted of primary and secondary colors. The bright-yellow center line of the highway, the black of the road itself. Green upon green out across the valley and into the sierras below timberline. Purple ridges and spires and summits. And above all this, blue. Blue-from-some-god’s-palette blue. I was awed.
    Discourse between me and Henry revived once we turned off the paved road and got onto the rough narrow winding track that edged the marshy mountain delta where Ash Creek split into fingerlets, then rejoined, finally to spill its racy waters into the wide, slow river out on the broad plain. We needed things in order to connect.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I asked.
    He looked to where I was pointing. “Sandhill crane,” he said. “We see a lot more of them than we used to.”
    â€œThat’s good,” I said.
    â€œIs it? They’re only here because of a freshwater lake some developers got it in their head to dig near here.”
    â€œI thought architects loved development.”
    â€œI’m hardly an architect anymore.”
    â€œYou think your night visitor’s been hired by some developer to get you off your place, maybe intimidate you into selling?”
    Henry cut me off, subtly but firmly, by just not answering. I glanced over at his profile as we were jostled by the thousand ruts and washboarding of the road, and saw there his firmness, his Fulton self-possession, a kind of stern restraint I had always admired in him but also feared.
    â€œThe road’s bad as ever,” I offered by way of apology, and he warmed again, remarking, “Just the way we want to keep it, all but washed out.”
    â€œThat’s one way to hold traffic down.”
    Behind us