Breaking the Fall Read Online Free Page A

told me he could not talk about his work, its labors, its boredom. But he surprised me. “There was an accident. A guy died.”
    â€œDied?” My father never talked about the factory.
    â€œA guy I knew to say hi to. A nice guy. A bunch of pipe rolled on him.”
    Words vanished. I must have said something like, “That’s awful.”
    â€œYes,” he said slowly, gazing at the empty screen. He didn’t talk for a long time. “Stanley,” he said, as though my name were the answer in a guessing game he was desperate to win.
    I meant to say something to cheer him, to reassure him.
    Before I could speak, he said, “I want you to take care of yourself.”
    When I was in bed, after I had fixed us some Weight Watchers lasagna, and after my father’s shower, I lay awake in what was left of the night. My father’s words kept plodding back into my mind.
    Not “a mountain of pipe collapsed.” Not “an avalanche of iron.” My father never dressed up the truth. Some pipe had rolled; a man was gone.
    I lay, staring at the blank ceiling, praying that everyone I knew would be safe, knowing how selfish this was. My parents were merely two humans in a world crowded with people.
    May my mother come home safely on the plane, and may my father be safe.
    And then I prayed that Jared would think of another game to play.

6
    My mother never looks at you when she talks to you. It’s as though we’re always on an assembly line putting together telephones or video machines and have to keep concentrating on our work.
    It was Monday morning, two days after my failure. Seattle had been a bitch, my mother said, which meant either that she had been very successful after a lot of trouble, and wanted a round of applause from me, or that Seattle had been a disaster and was beneath the level of civilized conversation.
    My first impression was that my father had left before either of us had crawled downstairs, but I tucked in my shirt and realized that things were not that simple. My mother looked fresh, and she had plainly been up for a long time. I was used to quiet, and quiet people. It made me aware of the different kinds of silence.
    Sometimes I thought I heard them having sex. I wasn’t sure. But a couple of times in my life I had awakened suddenly, certain that a voice had called out a name. Or not even a name—just a cry, like someone awakened with a syllable on her lips. This night had been dreamless, and I had almost overslept. But something had happened. The house looked smaller, and a sweater I had never seen before hung on the back of a chair. It was a black sweater, a woman’s cashmere. And my father’s toast crust was at my elbow.
    â€œEat more than a banana,” she said, adjusting her pantyhose through her skirt, a motion a little like a hula.
    â€œBananas have potassium. Bananas are the perfect food. You can’t eat anything better than a banana,” I said, and then I shut up for a moment.
    â€œSo Seattle was horrible,” I added after a while, in my father’s half-statement, half-question tone.
    I knew it bothered her when I began a question with so . It’s a way of dismissing everything that has been said and done, as though the following words are the point of the entire conversation.
    â€œI killed them,” she said. She messed up the line with her overprecise enunciation. Not “I killed ’em.”
    â€œFiguratively,” I responded, hating to sound so much like my father.
    A little nonlaugh as she stirred her coffee.
    I hunched against the kitchen door, gazing back at her. I didn’t have to ask. Perhaps it was the way she acted: when she was here she was always just recovering from one of their talks, or getting ready for another one. She and my father had spoken the night before, or even early that morning. It had been a hard conversation, one easy to imagine. Short sentences and long silences. Now she