Read Online Inexcusable by Chris Lynch - Free Book Online Page A

and drank less and exercised more. I found that—miracle—if I stretched regularly and correctly, my thigh muscle didn’t hurt anymore. I started going out forlong runs for the first time ever and discovered that I liked it. Not just the running, the thump-thump-thump of it, which could be boring as hell sometimes, and painful, and sick-inducing, but the touring element. Nearly every time I went out running in the weeks leading up to graduation, I felt like I was making my victory lap. I even began to have some kind of hazy fantasy, in which I had achieved something heroic and monumentally physical and was running around acknowledging the love and respect of the townspeople. I caught myself, on occasions, returning somebody’s normal greeting wave with a big all-hail-Caesar wave of my own.
    I hadn’t done anything. I knew I hadn’t done anything. All that was going on was the same thing that was going on for hundreds of other kids in town at the same time, that had gone on for thousands and thousands of other kids before us over the generations. I was finishing school, respectably but unspectacularly, and moving on away to college. I had done my time, had my times, and made my mark, although some might say my mark would have been better left unmade.
    But that was past, and it was okay now.
    I was starting to feel what was maybe an appropriate level of nostalgia for the old town. Passing my old ugly 1960s-style grammar school, I didn’t feel the same cold and disagreeable urge to cross the street and pretend I never knew the place. I felt more like a benign, warming,safe appreciation for it, a feeling stoked by the completely unexpected return of a few good memories there. Same for the church I no longer attended. Same for the Hi-Lo supermarket, which had changed to the A & P, which had changed to Stop & Shop, all of which I worked for, however briefly.
    Maybe, I thought—because I realized that I could have thoughts when I was running that I couldn’t seem to have at any other time—this was all a sign that I was getting old. Getting old really, really fast, like Robin Williams in that movie Jack. I was having to watch my weight, I was getting nagging little old-man injuries (my arches were now hurting), and I was getting all wishy-washy about a place that I really would have told you just a few weeks ago didn’t mean much more to me than hot meals, a nice house, and Ray.
    But I wasn’t getting old. In fact, if you asked most people, they’d say it was rare to even catch me acting my age.
    No, it was simpler than that. Simpler and more boring and normal.
    I was leaving. Leaving everything I had known, the place I was me, the people I had only ever known, and Ray.
    And, I suspected, I wasn’t coming back. Not really.
    Mary came back a lot, for a while that first year. Then she came back less. Then Fran started college, started coming back for lots of weekends and holidays, and then,lots less. And with the two of them now already signed up for some summer study program in Wales, it was not too hard to see the center of things here kind of pulling loose from its moorings.
    Maybe that’s what was getting to me. Why should that be getting to me? I’d been happy to move on. Anxious, even. Except for Ray.
    â€œWhat are you going to do, Ray?” I said without a word of explanation as I burst, sweaty and more breathy than necessary, through the door after my run.
    I felt a little ridiculous when I saw him there, cool as a cuke, cool as Ray, sitting in front of the TV with a turkey sandwich in his hand and a beer at his feet. He was watching a home improvement show, which was a passion of his. He personally refused to ever lift a hammer, paint a brush stroke, or oil a hinge so shrieky with rust the neighbors must have suspected the old single dad had been beating his poor kids daily for decades.
    â€œLook at the nonsense these guys waste precious life time on,”