If I Die Before I Wake Read Online Free Page A

euphoric at some times and disastrous at others. Jon always adored him, and no man I was with since had measured up in Jon's eyes. But Tom had hurt me, and I can't take any more hurt right now.
    “I have to go. I'm on my way out,” I say, hang up, grab up Angel, and rush out the door. After a quick stop at the post office to mail the letter, I turn the old car onto the country road that leads to the cemetery.

    I don't want to go home .
    It's not my home .
    I don't have a home .

    I've never felt like I had a home. Ruthie's words play through my mind. Tom's face, with his pale blue eyes that seem to see into my very soul, flashes in front of me. I step hard on the accelerator. I can't make the turn. The car skids off the road. Angel is thrown to the floor. Stopped, stunned, I gather the little terrier into my arms and weep. She licks at my tears and wiggles out of my arms. The door open, she jumps from the car and darts through a stand of trees. I follow her into a wide, grassy clearing.
    ——

    A fallen tree supports my back as I sit on the thick spongy grass, still damp from the early morning dew, and watch Angelexplore, peeing here and there. Warm beams of sunlight combine with a cool breeze to relax me. Sliding down, my head resting on the log, I notice the leaves are beginning to change color. Normally, I love the fall in Illinois—the red, orange, and yellow painting the edges of the foliage. But today the fall leaves take me back to another day, another time many years before when I felt much like I do at this moment: like I wish I could simply close my eyes, drift away, and never return. I wonder why I didn't let go of that boat.

5
Holding On

    IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1955, the year I turned 8. It would be my last summer on the Kaskaskia River with Grampa Chaplin and his wife, Alma. And, as my mother had reminded me several times, I had no one to blame but myself. I was a stupid, ungrateful child. If I had a brain, I would take it out and play with it. A whipping at the end of a willow switch couldn't have hurt any more than knowing I'd messed up the one good thing left in my life.
    To me, there was nothing better than life on the river. The old cabin sat on the banks of the Kaskaskia, next to the ThompsonMill covered bridge, with fields of corn behind it. Electricity was unnecessary; the cabin had oil lamps and a wood cookstove. A well with the coldest, best-tasting water I'd ever had, and a two-holer outhouse took the place of inside plumbing. There were no windows, only wooden flaps that could be pushed out and propped up with sticks. Daily life consisted of hunting, fishing, swimming (which passed for taking a bath), picking berries, drawing water, and gathering firewood for the stove where Alma prepared fabulous meals of fried catfish, potatoes, corn, and corn bread in heavy cast iron skillets. My mouth would water at the aroma of Alma's homemade bread and berry pies cooling near the window.
    As each mile passed on the hilly, twisting dirt roads that led to the river, I felt all the worries of town leave me. There was no greater feeling than discarding the hated secondhand dresses that never seemed to fit quite right, not having to attend a school where I would never fit in, not listening to the drunken fighting between whoever happened to be at the house, and not dealing with parents who seemed to be angry at me most of the time. The river was where I wanted to be, and I imagined that someday, when I got older, I would go there and live out my life.
    But all good things must come to an end, and for my brother and me, that end would happen the day my mother and her new husband, who used to be our uncle, came to fetch us at the river. The weather had turned cool after a hard rain a few days earlier. While Grampa and Bill went hunting squirrels, Alma heated a bucket of water on the stove, poured it into an oldwashtub set in front of the stove, and scrubbed me down good with lye soap and the wooden-handled scrub