Read Online Seasons of the Fool by Lynne Cantwell - Free Book Online

the floor. The kids’ artwork – pictures that had been hanging on the refrigerator for years – were in shreds.
    He went into to the living room. The drapes had been pulled down, their rods hanging at crazy angles. Throw pillows were scattered around the room, stuffing hanging out from rents in the fabric, and the sofa had been upended.
    “Nina?” he called softly.
    “Go away,” she sobbed.
    He followed her voice and found her cowering between the sofa and the wall. “Go away,” she moaned. “Why doesn’t anybody ever do what I tell them to do in this fucking house?”
    “Nina,” he said again, and held his hand out to her.
    “Get the fuck away from me!” she shouted. “You’ve never loved me! The kids have never loved me!”
    “That’s not true,” he said patiently.
    She reached beneath her and pulled out a knife. “I said,” she growled, “go away.”
    It was not the first time she had pulled a knife on him.
    He went back outside and called 911. Then he paced, as much to burn off the adrenaline as to keep warm, until the police and the ambulance showed up.
    These professionals had dealt with her before. But this was the first time the cops had had to use a Taser to subdue her.
    He called Angie again to let her know the kids would be staying for a while, and he called his department head to let her know he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week due to a family emergency. He wondered, as he ended that call, how many more family emergencies the university would tolerate before they let him go. He was on track for tenure – a rare enough thing in higher education these days – but he wasn’t there yet. He could still be fired.
    He knew he should follow the ambulance to the hospital. He knew he should go in and clean up the house, and be there for the kids. He knew the drill. This wasn’t the first time any of them had been through it.
    He couldn’t. Couldn’t do it again.
    He got back in the car and drove to Michiana.
    It hadn’t struck him, until he was nearly there, what a supremely dumb idea it was. Chicago was due to get only a dusting of snow; the other side of the lake was supposed to get hammered. And yet he kept driving. He needed a break. The kids would be fine with Nina’s sister. He needed – craved – these three days away.
    He was just so tired of having to deal with it all.
    Then he ran into Julia at the supermarket, and remembered what he could have had, if only his eighteen-year-old self had had the balls to stand his ground.
    No, Jule. I’m very much not okay. And I don’t see any way to make it better.
    ~
    Julia picked up the notebook at the very bottom of the stack. “Oh,” she said, very faintly. This one, she remembered.
    She had kept a journal during the summer after her senior year of high school. She’d spent it here in Michiana – supervising a kids’ acting class at the Dunes Summer Theatre in the mornings, waitressing at the pizza place on El Portal on weekend evenings. Tim, the oldest of the four of them, was already in the Navy, and Jen, who was next oldest, had snagged an internship in London. But Dave had been here. He had worked as a lifeguard – that was back when the village still hired lifeguards for the beach – and when he wasn’t at the beach, he had helped his father replace their deck.
    She and Dave had become very close that summer – so close that they talked about marriage. Both her parents and his were against it; they agreed that the kids needed to have some fun and get an education first, and see if they still felt the same way about each other in four years.
    Dave couldn’t see the point – and to be honest, neither could she. They made plans to elope. And then her parents died, and instead of following her heart, she did what they would have wanted her to do. It felt like she would be dishonoring their memory to do anything else.
    And then I met Lance, and he met Nina, and the rest is history.
    She put the notebook back in the box,