I Knew You'd Be Lovely Read Online Free

self-flagellation as he had ever come. No wonder he could only bear to do it via e-mail. His ex-wife meted out her disapproval succinctly: “When you correct others don’t humiliate them. Show them new tenderness; then they will humble themselves.” At first Fetterman had dismissed such lofty naïveté—and from a woman with no children of her own—but in short order began to accuse himself of a possible failure of imagination. A few days later, racking his brain for ways to try “new tenderness,” he’d conceived of the camping trip.
    Fetterman worked in tech support and had never beenon a camping trip, but it seemed the sort of excursion on which a father and son might reconnect. In his old life, he might even have imagined a touching lesson imparted while fishing, or a tender explanation of the constellations in the night sky, or a reconciliation after a near-death experience—perhaps a bear attack, or an unsuccessful river fording. In his old life, that is, before he’d had to apologize to the neighbor whose cat Derek lit on fire, before he’d had to explain to a third-grade teacher that there was no way his son had access to actual anthrax. Before his understanding of the world and its inhabitants had been completely transformed.
    Fetterman saw no reason to let a simple lack of experience stand in his way. On his lunch hour he drove to the bookstore in the strip mall down the road from his office and picked up
Wilderness Camping & Hiking: The Ultimate Outdoors Book
. The store was out of
Camping for Dummies
, which was fine by Fetterman; one of his overachiever classmates had patented the franchise, and Fetterman would sooner have been bastinadoed (
Medieval Torture for Dummies
) than add to that guy’s profit stream.
    He sat on a footstool and flipped through the pages, stopping at a diagram that showed how to use your jeans as a backpack by roping the waist and bringing the legs up over your shoulders as straps. The chapter featured all kinds of ingenious solutions to unlikely scenarios; “In Case of Emergency,” it was called. Fetterman closed the book, thinking:
Isn’t life just one big, long emergency, happening very, very slowly?
He bought a carrot muffinand an iced coffee and browsed the rest of the store, skipping the comic book section, of course. The only other book he considered buying was a memoir showcased among the new releases. It was written in the form of a letter from a mother to her runaway teenage daughter. On the back, a savvy blurb read: “Every fifteen-year-old is a runaway, whether she runs away or not.” Fetterman returned the volume to the shelf. Best not to give the boy any new ideas.
    Fetterman and Derek had been in the car for an hour and a half. Derek had yet to speak. He sat in the backseat, surly in his headphones, practically a caricature of teen angst. If Fetterman hadn’t put away his pencils for good, he might have been inspired to try to capture the embattled disinterest on his son’s features. He stole furtive glances in the rearview mirror: Derek had no nose piercings, no Mohawk, no black eyeliner, no trench coat. His face was so nakedly defiant, it was as if he didn’t need the props.
    It was not an unattractive face. As an infant, Derek had been the most beautiful baby. Everyone remarked on it. And so placid; he seemed to possess an otherworldly calm. “That boy is a Rembrandt cherub!” said a barista with horn-rimmed glasses the first Saturday Fetterman and Carla took him out into the world. That Derek had been such a well-behaved, delightful baby was one of the most painful ironies of their current situation. Carla had once gazed into his eyes the way a woman who has livedher whole life in the mountains would gaze at the sea. Now she’d started taking five milligrams of Valium every morning, and still it didn’t stop her hands from shaking.
    â€œJesus!” said Fetterman,