Away From Everywhere Read Online Free Page A

reasons.”
    â€œChange the topic. You know me better than that.”She tore another bun in half, and the irritated tone in her voice verified her honesty. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be here, and we both know it. And you’re going to have to get used to being treated like this for a while, but don’t worry. With time, things will get …I don’t know, easier.” She bit into the bun.
    â€œIt’s not like I accidently broke a vase in the guy’s house, Lilly. I shattered his fucken life. And the kids’.” He stopped talking as his voice constricted. His throat filled with sand. He shut his eyes tight, tight enough to numb them.
    Lillian acknowledged she might have just lied to him with a quick rise and fall of her face. He was that itchy, old, worn-out sweater that everyone was finally throwing away. The one they weren’t sure why they’d ever kept around anyway.
    Lillian could get away with an allegiance to both sides because she was a paradox in every way. She grew herbs and only ate vegetables from her own greenhouse, yet she smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. She stocked seven bird feeders with different feeds and photographed the array of birds that gathered in her backyard, but had no interest in their proper names. She was that ethereal person who walked around town with all the unofficial privileges a cop has: using the staff washroom in the public library or poking her nose where it didn’t belong, and no one would question it. So, the night Owen was released from the hospital, Alex never resented her when she knocked on his door and matter-of-factly stated she was there for Owen’s things, that she was on her way to the hospital to pick him up and take him back to her place. He swung the door open, let her in, helped her gather Owen’s things and bag them in Sobeys bags. She stayed for coffee, drew horses with the girls, offered to help Alex in any way she could, and left no less loved and respected. Callie and Lucia were clinging to her right arm and begging her to stay as she pulled the door shut.

    When Lillian got home from Hannah’s service, Owen didn’t have to pry for the summary. She came in, brushed snow from her jacket, put on some coffee, called out to him, assured him that she was alone, and sat him down at her small, round, mahogany table. She burst right into one of her philosophical rants, but all he wanted was the details of the service: Who wept and who stood stoic? Had the circumstances of her death polluted the atmosphere? Trimmed down the attendance? His head was full of uncouth questions he couldn’t bring himself to ask. They’d have to sit there like burning embers.
    She tore into an obviously prepared speech, stringing sentences together without pause. “I am not going to try and justify what you did, because infidelity is cruel and savage,” she said, speaking as matter-of-factly as she always did.“But I know, like you now know, that in an affair people are too quick to blame people , because our feelings are out of our hands, and anyone with a grain of sense knows that much.” She plucked her earrings out and slapped them down on the table as she finished the sentence.“Your father and I sat around this table having the same conversation one night,Owen.”She tapped two fingers on the table, her thick pink nails dinging like metal on wood. “He said love is beautiful in the same way a lion is. Half the beauty is in the sheer power of the thing. The control it has over you. And the chance it might tear you apart.”
    It was evident she’d practiced this speech in the car on the way home, as a consolation for him, and the need to be consoled, to have his actions justified, made him feel pathetic and irritable.
    â€œOur feelings are out of our hands. We cannot blame ourselves for how we feel. Sometimes it just happens, like rain.” She pointed at the