Mary Coin Read Online Free

Walker’s wrist with surprising force. Walker heard his father’s struggling wheezes, smelled the sour, spent odor of George’s mouth, seventy-four years of food and saliva and sucked-back tears and sucked-back feelings stored in the nooks between yellowed teeth. His eyes darted with a wild, unruly energy.
    “Burn me up,” he whispered.

4.
     
    W hen Walker and Lisette split, they sold their house in the Sunset District, and he now lives in an apartment in the Mission, which he has not decorated with much more personality than the motel rooms he occupies during his fieldwork. He knows he ought to pay more attention to his place and try to make it a proper second home for Alice and Isaac. But their weekends are filled with activities, and they want to be close to their friends, so they rarely visit him in the city. During the school year, Walker drives to Petaluma to see them—sometimes twice a week—taking the kids out to dinner, or Isaac to his soccer practice or to an orthodontist appointment. Alice recently got her license, so it is a challenge to invent her need for him unless Lisette has impounded her car keys for one reason or another. Walker’s visits have the quality of courtship. He takes great pleasure in dressing, in planning the activities, in the nervousness he feels as he nears the highway exit, the adrenaline kick when he pulls to the curb outside Lisette and Harry’s yellow cottage. He honks and waits for the door to open and for his kids to appear. They are shy and petulant as they ford the turbulent distance between the house and his car. There is something sweet and tentative about the way the awkwardness of the encounters makes it impossible for any of them to take the time for granted, even though the kids complain to their mother about “having” to see Dad and sit heavily into the car and do not speak for a few minutes, or even fifteen minutes. Once Alice managed to go a whole night without saying a word. Her reticence is sometimes physically painful for Walker, who can still feel the sensation of her warm body against his chest when he lifted her from her crib each morning. Still, the discomfort is worthwhile for the pleasure he feels when Isaac inadvertently hums a song or when Alice delivers the first of her thrusts, which Isaac does not have the requisite aggression to parry—when they cannot help but be themselves.
    He is taking them on a fishing trip to Humboldt County for a long weekend. Isaac says he is excited to go, but Walker suspects the only reason Alice has agreed is that hanging around the pot capital of California will give her bragging rights with her friends. The kids are particularly sluggish when he picks them up. Alice drags her unrolled sleeping bag down the front walkway, a nasty, lolling tongue of girlish purple and pink meant to reassure him of her absolute disinterest in this vacation. Upon seeing his contrary, difficult girl, Walker realizes how much he has missed her and her dedication to her misery, as well as her intelligence, which shines despite her valiant attempts to hide it. He loves her tangled blond hair and her wide face. The small mole on her cheek is probably a point of intense scrutiny and the locus of a vague unhappiness, but he thinks it distinguishes her, and that, in time, some boy or man will tell her that it is something he loves about her. She dresses in a combination of clothes that Walker recognizes as the province of hip kids everywhere: thrift-shop finds jumbled together in mismatch, a kind of assertive ugliness, as if she is daring others to locate the beauty she cannot yet find in herself.
    Isaac comes out of the house in his usual state of akimbo—shoelaces undone, his cartoonish bubble of blond hair flattened from sleep, bright pimples sprayed across his forehead. He wears the fishing vest Walker bought for him the previous Christmas and carries his fishing pole. Walker feels grateful to his son for willingly entering into the possible