Read Online Travelling Light by Peter Behrens - Free Book Online Page A

eat it with a spoon.
    Alix began washing dishes. There weren’t many — her own juice glass, a marmalade knife, a plate with crumbs of toast and butter — but she filled the sink and swirled hot, soapy water in the glass.
    â€œLeave that for the dishwasher, why don’t you,” said Mr. Heaney. “Come and sit down.”
    She watched him scooping his egg. She’d always loved his hands, the strong knuckles, well-shaped fingers, neatly pared nails. He was a fastidious man.
    The fresh morning — trees out in new leaf, the smell of wet grass drifting through the kitchen window, the sharp sunshine — reminded her of the Life magazine story about the wives of the astronauts and those brilliant Florida mornings when their men rocketed into space leaving behind game, pretty, utterly bereft wives.
    In another hour or so Mike would be blasting off. Alix looked at her own hands. They seemed a pair of sad, tired things, birds in a cage.
    She heard her son on the back porch, knocking sand from his shoes. Mr. Heaney folded his newspaper as Mike came inside. He was wearing grey sweats, the sleeves too short for his long arms. His cheeks were flushed from exercise. He shut the door and kicked off his shoes.
    â€œHow many miles?” said Mr. Heaney.
    â€œSix,” said Mike. “Up to the summit and twice around.” He dropped into a chair and Mr. Heaney reached across the table to give his son’s biceps a squeeze.
    â€œWhat will you have?” said Alix. “Let me scramble some eggs.”
    â€œYou’re going to have to put on weight, Mike,” his father said. “I was skinny until I started rowing. That’s when I put on some good, hard weight.”
    â€œI got these pains in my side.”
    â€œDid you stretch?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œYou have to stretch.”
    Alix broke eggs into a bowl, added milk, stirred, and poured them into a pan.
    â€œAre you all packed up?” Mr. Heaney said. “Remember what I said about driving after dark. Better to get a good start, quit at sunset, and find a good place to camp. After dark is when all the nut-jobs are out on the road.”
    Alix put bread into the toaster. “How far will you get tonight, Mike?”
    â€œMaybe Sault Ste. Marie?”
    â€œWill you please phone us from wherever you are,” Alix said.
    Mike looked at his father and shrugged. “Sure.”
    The day they heard about Bobby, Mike’s father was waiting in the living room when he got home from school. After he’d been told he wanted to go someplace to be alone, someplace he wouldn’t have to believe Bobby was dead, but his father held him close and wouldn’t even let him go up to his room until he promised that he understood. He had promised, but even then his father kept hugging him and wouldn’t let him go, and then Mike realized his father was crying, and then he had really felt scared.
    Mr. Heaney shook open the Gazette to the financial section. “Wasn’t Clare going to call?” he asked.
    Alix dished Mike’s scrambled eggs onto a plate. Their oldest daughter had promised to call before Mike left, even though it was awfully early in California. Alix took a sip of coffee and summoned a mental picture of Clare in her bedroom in the purple darkness that must still be covering the Pacific coast.
    Jean, their younger daughter, was most likely still in bed in her little apartment in Toronto, probably with her latest bearded boyfriend.
    Since Bobby, Alix had always been aware that her children, separated from the house, might cease to exist, and if it happened she wouldn’t even know until someone — some stranger — called to tell her.
    For a long time after his death she’d had nightmares of her son trapped in a burrow in the millions of tons of ice and glacial till that had consumed him. The glaciers were melting, shrinking by inches every year. Six years after Bobby’s