Read Online The Care and Feeding of Griffins by R. Lee Smith - Free Book Online Page A

Christopher’s medallion that hung on the end of it, and pressed it into Taryn’s palm even as she shrank back.
    “ Dad,” she began, shaking her head.
    “ Don’t argue with me, daughter,” he said, and curled her fingers firmly around the silver.  “If it’s lost, it’s lost.  But while you have it, you’ll wear it, and you’ll remember that somewhere in the world, the people that you love are missing you and waiting for you to return with honor.  Take it, Taryn.  I won’t ask you to explain, but I’m telling you to take it.”
    She put it on and felt the heavy drag of the little medallion bowing at her neck and burning like a stone in her heart.  There was no celebration left in lunch, but Taryn ate anyway, painfully aware that it would be the last time she tasted these foods for a long, long time.
    Afterwards, there were hugs all around and nothing else to say but “I love you,” and that couldn’t be said enough.  She popped the trunk and endured an examination of her camping gear by first her father and then her mother and finally Rhiannon.  “It’s not enough,” her mother kept saying, a little more desperately each time.  “It’s nowhere near enough.  How will you live?”
    “ I have to carry everything,” Taryn reminded her.  “I’ll be okay.  And I have to go, Mom.  I want to say goodbye to Granna.”
    “ Then you’ve already told John?” Rhiannon asked.
    Taryn winced, closing up the trunk of her car.  “And John,” she said heavily.
    “ You’re leaving tonight and you haven’t even told your boyfriend?”  Rhiannon shook her head again, hard, not merely negating Taryn’s behavior but actually seeming to try and throw it off like water.  “W-What is the matter with you?”  She started to cry and ran off in the direction of her own car across the parking lot.
    Taryn watched her little sister go, feeling the weight of her parent ’s stares itching between her shoulder blades.  She knew she wasn’t handling this parting very well.  She supposed there might even be a better way out there somewhere, but she doubted it.  Some goodbyes were never going to be good ones, no matter what a person did.
    The drive to the retirement village where Granna Birgit lived felt easily twice as long as it should have on a sunny autumn day.  She was too much aware of all the ‘last times’ she was having.  She couldn’t pass a UPS truck without thinking that it would be three years at least before she saw another one, or received a package in the mail, or took anything to the post office.  She walked into the home under a fugue of this depression and called out to her grandmother’s cabin with a voice that was already on the edge of fresh tears.
    If her grandmother was surprised to see her visiting on a Tuesday morning, she did a good job of disguising it, welcoming Taryn with the same Irish cheer that she always did.  Taryn collected a kiss and a hug and a cup of cocoa and sat with it in her grandmother ’s window, trying to stammer out the same story she’d given her folks while the echoes of Rhiannon’s tears did their best to bore into the very soul of her.  Granna Birgit sat and rocked and knitted without interrupting, but the aged head came right up when Taryn got to the part about settling in a wilderness.
    “ What are you taking?” she asked then, her eyes bird-bright and piercing.  She’d listened closely through about half of Taryn’s clumsy checklist, but then she’d thrown down her knitting with an unladylike snort and plucked the cocoa out of Taryn’s hands.  “What garbage!” she chuckled, shaking her head.  “Air mattress, ha!  The ground is good enough for your young bones.  It’d spring a leak in a week’s time anyway, and there you’d be.  Collapsible chairs and camping stoves!  Sit on a rock and learn to cook on coals, girl!  There are things you can learn to live without, aisling,” she said gently, squeezing Taryn’s hands.