A Small Indiscretion Read Online Free Page A

we’d pick her up on our way out of the city. We all piled into the Suburban and set off, and when we reached the store, I knocked on the glass door, then returned to the car to wait.
    “ ‘The Salvaged Light,’ ” you read. “Did you repaint the sign?”
    “Yes,” I said. “The old one was getting faded.”
    “I used to call it ‘the Savage Light,’ ” you said.
    “Because you had a lisp.”
    “It wasn’t the lisp. I really thought it was ‘the Savage Light.’ Because of that book we had, remember? About the savage.”
    “I remember that book,” your father said. “We must have read it to you a thousand times. It was about a boy who writes a story about a monster, right? Then the monster comes to life.”
    “It wasn’t really a monster,” you said. “It was just a person who went wild. The boy starts writing the story when his father dies, to distract himself. When the savage comes to life, he can’t tell where he ends and the savage begins.”
    “I always wondered what the writer was trying to say, metaphorically speaking,” your father said.
    “Something about the power of the stories we tell ourselves to fend off despair,” I said. “Or am I being too literal?”
    Polly piped up from the third row of seats. “I know that story. I remember it. We still have that book.”
    “No, we don’t,” Clara said.
    “Yes, we do,” Polly said.
    “No, we don’t. Mommy gave it away to the library with all the other books.”
    “I didn’t give all the books away,” I said. “Just the ones nobody ever reads.”
    Emme emerged from the store, cutting short the argument. She was wearing very short shorts and her combat boots, and she carried an enormous fringed bag over one shoulder. Her legs were thin and pale and her hair was so thick and blond and long it was more like a Barbie’s hair than a woman’s. I had never seen it down before. I’d only seen it tucked beneath a hat or a scarf or pulled back in a headband or wound around her head in a braid, like a crown.
    She stepped toward us in the fog. Did it shoot through the air between you right then—the speeding bullet of recognition or desire?
    She climbed into the car next to you. She was holding a book, which she dropped into the side pocket of her bag so she could shake your hand.
    “Robbie, this is Emme,” I said. “Emme, this is Robbie.”
    “Nice to finally meet you, Robbie,” she said.
    You lifted the book out of the pocket of her bag and examined the cover.
“Zen Koans?”
    “Yes,” she said quietly.
    “What’s a Send-Going?” Polly asked from the back.
    You laughed. “Zen ko-an,” you said slowly. “It’s a paradox, or a puzzle, used to teach enlightenment. For instance, ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ ”
    “Why do you know this?” I said, turning to look at you.
    “My department chair is interested in the link between physics and enlightenment.”
    Jonathan glanced back. “He is?”
    “Yep.”
    “Wow,” your father said. “Interesting. So if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”
    “Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they’re transmitted into what we call sound,” you said. “The shock waves themselves are not sound.”
    “But does it make a sound or not?” Clara asked.
    “We don’t really know,” Emme said. “That’s the mystery we’re intended to sit with.”
    “Are you a Buddhist?” you said.
    “Oh, no,” Emme said. “I just saw the author speak at a bookstore in the Mission. He made it all seem so simple. He said we can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness. By throwing it overboard.”
    “I like that,” Jonathan interjected enthusiastically. “Let’s all throw unhappiness overboard.”
    “But you’re already happy,” I said to him, not altogether kindly. His optimism and good humor occasionally struck me as