Read Online Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas - Free Book Online Page B

their hooks. A ship a quarter mile long passes an island with a scraggly sapling, its roots thirsty in the sand or bare upon granite piles.
    Her street is cobbled. It’s like a residential oasis in a desert of dead trade. The oaks and birches are thick with leaves. An air conditioner hums and rattles somewhere behind them. An older man sits on his stoop. She stops in front of a narrow townhouse.
    â€œThis is it.”
    She starts to the stoop and turns. She closes her eyes and tilts back her head—waiting for a summer breeze. It doesn’t come. She waves. “Bye.” She comes back to me. She wants a kiss goodnight. I bend for her and give her my cheek. She rubs her cheek against mine and says bye again, too loudly in my ear. I step back. She ascends the stairs, finds her keys, unlocks the door, and disappears.
    There are ghosts on the street tonight. There’s a giant moon in the eastern sky, low and orange. It throws light on the asphalt, light and shadows of tree leaves and telephone wires. My father ran out on us when he was the age I am now, but he didn’t have the heart to just go. First he went to the couch, then to the Ramada, and only after adecade of coming in and out of my life did he finally allow himself to completely disappear. Then he returned—again—for my wedding and stood with me and the minister and Gavin behind what was left of an old farmhouse, the stone foundation wall. I hadn’t seen him in six years and in that time he’d lost his hair, his teeth, and I thought any claim to me as a son.
    I gave Claire my mother’s ring, a white gold band with the world’s smallest diamond. And her face fell like I’d just broken her heart, but then the smile came—long, trembling. I remember being quiet, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak, but she didn’t. She kept looking from her ringed finger to me—back and forth.
    She wore ivory. It took place at Edith’s in a clearing, just before the rosehips and the dunes. It was five thirty and an August storm was rolling north up the coast. I could hear thunder booming from Rhode Island. Edith gave her daughter away. Claire’s veil whipped about her head in the wind. Above us seabirds squawked and flew inland as the clouds rolled out—charcoal and billowy. I looked out at the congregation, my family on one side, hers on the other. We read our vows and we kissed and the clouds burst. After the rain, a double rainbow appeared with one foot in the little guery pond and the other out in Buzzards Bay. In the receiving line people commented—as though their observations were original—on the auspicious beginnings of our union. We shook hands with people. We hugged people. And Claire seemed to be truly happy—raindrops or tears on the end of her swooping nose, unblinking green eyes. Her cheeks were like two suns at magic hour—what the day was fading into. Double rainbows: double rosy suns. Her grandfather was the only one who shot straight.
    â€œI think I gave you silver.”
    â€œThank you, sir.”
    â€œTwelve or sixteen settings. You’ll see soon enough.”
    â€œThank you, grandpa.”
    â€œYou know, he’d said, taking in her cheeks or the rainbows behind. It’s going to be an awfully rough road to hoe.”
    Claire read when he died. “Little Gidding”—the fifth movement. She’d announced in the pulpit of the old barn church, and the congregation had smiled and nodded in approval, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from . . .” She read it with lock-jawed precision. I had typed it out for her the night before on bond paper and left it sitting beside her coffee and grapefruit that morning. “Every poem an epitaph. And any action / Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat / Or to an illegible stone: and this is where