Into the Darkness Read Online Free Page B

bracelets,” Mom teased.
    “Is that so? I want you both to know that I won the English award at high school graduation. I used to dream of living the life Thoreau proposed. If we all did, there would be fewer heart attacks, strokes, and nervous breakdowns,” he said, waving his extended right forefinger like some soap-box orator.
    “Big shot,” Mom said, pointing her fork at him. She turned to me. “This is the man who wants us to get a new television set because ours isn’t high-definition. That’s not very Thoreau-like, Mr. Taylor.”
    “Well, if we’re going to work ourselves to the bone . . .” Dad paused and thought a moment. “I said I dreamed of living like Thoreau. I also remember dreaming of being Superman.”
    We both laughed.
    “So, why was this eleven talking about Thoreau?” Mom asked.
    “He asked me to take a walk, and when I hesitated, he quoted Thoreau to emphasize how important it was to get out of the house and into nature.”
    “Now, there’s a new approach,” Dad said. “Quoting famous authors to win over a young maiden’s heart.”
    “Really? As I recall, you quoted poetry when we first met, Gregory Taylor,” Mom said. She sat back and narrowed her eyes in a pose of faux suspicion. “Was it just a slick come-on or did you mean it?”
    Dad tugged his left earlobe as if he was hoping to shake the right response out of his brain. “It happened to be spontaneous. The moment I set eyes on you, I thought, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . .’”
    “That wasn’t the quote,” Mom said.
    “It wasn’t?”
    “No. You were a John Denver fan.”
    “Oh, right.” Dad smiled. “‘You’re so beautiful, I can’t believe my eyes each time I see you again.’”
    “I thought he had made it up until he played thesong for me,” Mom told me. “Of course, I wondered how many girls he used that line on, but he swore I was the first,” she added, looking at him suspiciously again.
    “You were—the first and only, Noreen, and always will be.”
    Mom’s eyes glittered like the eyes of diamonds that Dad anticipated I would someday have for a certain special man.
    In fact, if someone really wanted to know why I was so hard to please when it came to boyfriends, he or she simply had to spend a few minutes with my parents. The man I fell in love with would have to have eyes full of me the way my father’s eyes were full of my mother, I thought. I’d never be some man’s stopover on his way to finding someone he believed was right for him. Maybe that was my problem. I was adamant about it. I had seen too many of my girlfriends devastated by boys they had thought were special. Of course, the same was very true for boys who thought that of girls. Sometimes, I thought, it was all just too complex. Think less, feel more, I told myself, but I didn’t listen to myself, at least not right then.
    “So, are you going on this walk?” Mom asked.
    “I guess. It’s just a walk.”
    “Nothing is just anything,” Dad said, assuming the role of elder statesman in our house. “Everything leads to something else, young lady. Shall I review history, the causes of the First World War, the . . .”
    “Spare us, Gregory. Besides, did you ever think that’s what she’s hoping for, something leading to something? Don’t throw cold water.”
    I felt myself blush. “No. Really. It’s just a walk. Idon’t even know if I like him or anything. I just spoke to him for a few minutes. I mean, I hardly . . .”
    I struggled to find the right words. Both of them laughed.
    I felt as embarrassed as a little girl who had stumbled on something very sophisticated, like the time I asked how women without husbands could still make babies.
    “Oh, we’re just funning you,” Mom said, reaching for my hand. “You just go and enjoy yourself.”
    “I don’t know,” Dad said. “Eleven or not, I should meet this boy first. He might be a young Jack the Ripper. Rumor