Read Online Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken - Free Book Online

block of chalk.
    â€œPay attention,” Ed said to me. “Here’s where your education begins.”
    He doffed his tweed jacket and hung over the pool table, defying gravity the way he did, and they began to play. Everything I knew about pool I’d learned from a W. C. Fields short, which is really all you need, as long as you’re a spectator. Ed murdered the guy. They shook hands and the railroad man handed over a dollar bill.
    â€œGood grief, Ed,” I said. “Where did you learn that?”
    â€œChicago.” He picked up his glass.
    â€œThat’s where I want to go.”
    He waited for me to explain myself. I couldn’t. My plans—I’d been planning continuously since talking to Rose, more efficiently than I ever had with Hattie—were as precise and unlikely as a house of cards, and to disturb a single piece, I thought, would topple them over. I counted on Ed to read my mind.
    He took a swig of beer. “Why Chicago?”
    I whispered, “Vaudeville.”
    â€œI adore your father. . . .” he said.
    â€œI know you do.”
    Ed frowned. I readied myself for a lecture on Duty and Business and Courage. Instead he picked up his jacket and put it on carelessly, so he looked like a bum in a scarecrow’s too-tight duds. Then, with an elegant shake of his shoulders followed by a small finesse of his wrists, he realigned it. (That was the most valuable move Ed ever taught me. I practiced for ages, to get from fool to dandy with one shrug. It was a great sight gag. I never got as good at it as Ed.)
    â€œDubuque!” yelled one of the men. “Don’t leave!”
    Ed flashed a salesman’s smile. “Stephens!” he yelled back, in a deep voice I’d never heard before. “Gotta leave!” He turned to me. “That’s why your father and I are a good team. Half the men in town won’t trust a fellow who won’t shoot billiards with them. The other half won’t trust one who does. Chicago.” Ed sighed, as though he hated the thought. “Vaudeville. Well, I can give you some names.”
    We had stopped on the steep stairs of the pool hall down to the street; a man who looked as though he’d been sleeping in a field, flossy with straw and cornsilk, passed by us. I grabbed Ed’s hand and shook it.
    He looked even more pained than he had before. “I’d try to talk you out of going, if it’d do any good.”
    â€œIt won’t.”
    â€œI’m aware of that,” he said. “I’ve left places myself a few times. You’ll need some clothes.”
    He took me back across the street to the alley entrance of the darkened store. “Mr. Sharp?” he called, unlocking the door. No answer. I’d been in Sharp’s thousands of times since childhood, but never when it was empty of my father.
    Ed moved through the store, pulling shirts from shelves, a suit from one of the storage cabinets, a straw boater from a hatbox in the back room, a pair of brown oxfords. In five minutes he’d put together a pretty snappy outfit, snappier than I would have thought possible from the stock at Sharp’s. My father would have been happy to carry nothing but coveralls and funeral suits, but Ed talked him into buying a few things for the odd local college boy. I pulled on the suit’s vest, which had so many pockets it made me look like a chest of drawers. I loved it.
    â€œYou’ll break your father’s heart, you know,” said Ed.
    â€œI know.”
    â€œWhen are you going to tell him?”
    â€œI wasn’t planning to,” I said.
    â€œThen I guess you better start planning,” snapped the normally deferential Ed. “Don’t be a coward. It’s too hard to live with yourself. Your father deserves a good-bye. More than that, but at least that much.”
    I stared at the floor. I could not imagine a world in which I would jauntily tell my father, So