Read Online The Art of Adapting by Cassandra Dunn - Free Book Online

shook his head, clearing the effects of the unexpected noise, and chuckled himself, a rattle of mini-huffs, like the rumbling startof an ancient car. As he wandered back toward his room Lana raised her eyebrows at Byron. He shrugged, grinning.
    â€œHe’s funny. Who knew?”
    Lana left him to his homework, headed upstairs to check on Abby, who was busy writing in a journal in her room. Abby ignored Lana in her doorway, so Lana left her alone. Lana pulled Graham’s wedding ring out of her pocket and set it in the jewelry box where her ring now lived. Maybe someday she’d sell them. Or give them to the kids. Just as she was sinking into a pool of self-pity, her cell phone rang somewhere in the house. She never had it on her, and never got to it before it went to voice mail.
    â€œMom!” Byron yelled. “Phone!” It drove her kids crazy that Lana didn’t keep better track of her phone. They lived on theirs, but nobody really called Lana, aside from her sister Becca. The only people who ever sent texts from Lana’s phone were her kids, to keep under the texting limit Graham had set for them. She met Byron on the stairs, holding her phone out to her.
    â€œYou missed the call.”
    â€œOf course I did. I always do.” She smiled.
    â€œWho’s Nick Parker?” Byron asked.
    Lana opened her mouth and closed it again, wondering if he’d overheard her talking to Graham. It took her a moment to realize the missed call had been from Nick Parker. The perfect, chiseled dreamboat of her past popping up in her present to pull her out of her own wallowing. Twice.
    â€œAn old friend,” she said. An old friend who didn’t have her number. She smiled and hit the call-back button as Byron headed for the kitchen, back to Hemingway.
    â€œAre you a stalker?” she asked when Nick answered. “How’d you get my number?”
    â€œI’m a cop,” he said, laughing. “You never called for that coffee, so I thought I’d remind you. No pressure. If you aren’t interested . . .”
    â€œHow’s Friday?”

6
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Matt
    Matt preferred forty-five-degree angles for most things. Ninety was too sharp. Thirty was too shallow. But forty-five felt just right. Each item just far enough apart to make it easy to grasp without knocking anything else over. Matt hated his clumsy nature, but it was what it was, so he just tried not to crowd things together, and never put anything at the edge of a table. Spacing was important. Spacing was soothing. Spacing was forgiving when Matt’s body didn’t cooperate with his brain.
    Matt arranged his food the same way, separate bowls and plates and utensils a few inches apart, spokes extending out from the wheel of his dinner plate at forty-five-degree angles. He admired the arrangement of objects the way he took in the beautiful alignment of a constellation. Not that constellations were aligned, not carefully placed or symmetric like he liked his food. In fact, it was the asymmetric nature that drew him to stars. So much chaos and chance, scattered all around. But then held in place for eternity. It was infinitely distracting and inexplicably soothing.
    But the food, that had to be at forty-five degrees. He started with the dinner plate, and set the blue cup and green bowl of carrots at the proper angles. He liked his blue cup best because it was the hardest to tip over, and he preferred a particular spoonand fork that felt most secure in his hand. He liked the carrots in a small green bowl just for carrots, and the corn on a very small salad plate with slightly raised edges. Lana was just finishing making dinner, and he didn’t have his napkin or silverware yet, and the special corn plate was missing, replaced by an extra salad bowl. He didn’t want to make a fuss, but he wanted the plate instead of another bowl. He tried to like having the bowl for a change. As he arranged them one by one, the