Read Online Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong - Free Book Online

both her knees, but turns to face him.
    Ben laughs and sets his right foot up on the highest step, leaning over it, then does the same with his left. He stops the timer on his watch. “Still pretty impressive,” he says.
    He rests his hand briefly on her back.
    â€œStretch,” he says.
    She shakes her head and positions her feet as he has. She leans forward, feeling that first satisfying pull of her muscles loosening.
    â€œYou’ll be a wonderful coach,” she says.
    â€œHow the fuck did we get this so wrong?” says Stephen. Ben’s out with friends. She and Stephen sit with cartons of take-out Thai food. They have a daughter they’ve locked up in rehab, and a son who’s dropping out of college. Maya has decided to bring Ben up first.
    â€œTwo kids who’ve fucked up so royally,” Stephen says. His knuckles look sharp and white on top of his chopsticks. They hover over a large plastic container of greasy pork and vegetable pad thai.
    â€œStephen.” She watches a noodle split between his teeth.
    â€œShould I just accept this? One of us has to actually face all this. To parent , Maya. He’s a child.”
    She picks up her chopsticks and flips them back and forth through her fingers. She’s left-handed and they make a hollow knocking sound against her simple white gold wedding band. “He’s nineteen.”
    â€œExactly. He has no idea what he’s doing. You can’t get a job busing tables without a college degree.”
    â€œPlease, just give him a little time. They were so close, you know? We should have realized how much all of this affected him. I think it’s admirable, that he acknowledges he’s not getting anything from school.”
    â€œAre you serious? We must have made them this way, you know. It can’t have been easy, being so wonderful all the time, having everything given to you, having everything come so easily.”
    â€œJust give him a break. He’ll come back on his own.”
    â€œFrom what? He needs a kick in the ass, is what he needs. You let them think they deserved things without having to work for them. You’re so committed to your catering to them, giving everything you could think to give to them, but then you were the one who would disappear. I never got so scared or sad or whatever it was you got that I needed breaks from parenting.”
    Once, when Ben was two and El was four, she’d flown down to Florida for three weeks, just to be quiet for a while, just to be alone with the water and her books and not have to love quite as much as she did when her kids were there. She escaped sometimes, either to her study, or right there in front of them. She curled into herself for fear of how all that love—more than she could feel she had a hold of—might inflict itself in ways she hadn’t meant.
    â€œThat’s because you weren’t around as much as I was.”
    â€œBecause I was working, remember? You wanted them to feel loved the way you didn’t. You wanted to right all that shit with your dad. You taught them this.”
    Maya’s father. Ice clinking on the thick highball glass he always carried, filled with scotch when she was younger, then gin later, the brush of his hand cold and quick across her cheek, the meticulousness with which he dressed each morning, his thumb and forefinger—meaty, hardened from working closely with the contractors at the houses that he bought and sold—working carefully to button each side of his shirt collar, dark socks and the musty heavy leather smell of his newly polished shoes.
    Her mother had left them, three months, nearly to the day, after Maya was born. She knew this through the one letter that her mother had written to her father. She’d dated it, in some odd attempt at propriety, in the moment that she’d absconded in theface of life’s demands. The letter said that she was sorry. It said this was not the life