Take Me There Read Online Free Page A

Mozart and Stravinsky at the University of Texas. I’m not just barroom trash, you know.”
    “Want some crackers?”
    She didn’t answer, so I sat down next to her and crumbled saltines into her bowl.
    “Then I met your father.”
    I held my breath for a minute. I was well aware that Dylan Sr. was the source of her unhappiness, but she rarely talked about him.
    “He promised me the moon. I believed he could deliver it. God, you should have seen him in college.”
    “He went to college?” I never pictured my father as being university material.
    “He had this way of talking about dreams as if they really could come true. He said he was going to take me to New York City. Instead I ended up on his parents’ pig farm in Quincy, Texas.” Mom took another long drink from the bottle. “I was in the chorus of
Carmen
with the Houston opera when I was eighteen, and by the time I turned twenty I was three months pregnant, living in a single-wide trailer.”
    I knew it was just the liquor talking, but I couldn’t help but think about how I’d helped ruin her life just by being born.
    Mom set the bottle back on the table and I coaxed the spoon to her lips. She took a bite and then cried some more and blew her nose into her napkin.
    “How about I read to you from Yeats? You always like that.”
    She dried her eyes on her napkin and tried to smile. “That would be nice.”
    I helped Mom back into the living room to the threadbare sofa. Then I took
Poetry Through the Ages
out of the stack of plastic milk crates she used as a bookshelf, found my reading glasses, pulled a chair up beside her, and pretended to read from the section of the book dedicated to William Butler Yeats.
    My uncle Mitch has a saying, “Cozy up to the things that scare you. Snuggle up next to ’em and then bite off their damn heads.” Uncle Mitch has a lot of sayings, most of which can’t be repeated in civilized company. You have to sift through a lot of junk, but occasionally there’s a gem of wisdom in the trash heap.
    I took that one to heart and started cozying up to books. No one would think of accusing a guy of being illiterate when he’s got himself a book of poetry. The reading glasses were another trick. I didn’t need them, but they came in handy whenever somebody asked me to read something. I would just say I couldn’t find my glasses.
    “Do ‘The Stolen Child’ on page twenty-two,” Mom told me.
    I turned to page twenty-two, though I knew the poem by heart. I had for years. Mom never read me Dr. Seuss or
Hop on Pop
. When I was little she read me Yeats, Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, over and over. So many times their words burned paths through my memory. We’d sit on the threadbare sofa of whatever dive we were living in, listening to the police sirens going by every few minutes. Mom always said we’d be rich as long as we had poetry.
    “The key is in Yeats,” she said. Mom told me that whenever she got drunk. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. “Fourteen, thirty-eight, twenty-two. Remember those numbers.” They wereher three favorite poems; the pages were dog-eared with their numbers circled. She patted my hand and nodded her head to emphasize the point, as if this information might save my life someday.
    “Okay, Ma,” I told her, and then pretended to read from the book, about the fairies of Sleuth Wood who stole children away:
    “Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
    Mom squeezed my hand. “You’re a good boy, Dylan. I know you’ve gotten into some trouble, but you have a good heart.”
    I closed the book and stood up. I couldn’t listen to her talk about my “good heart” when she didn’t know half the things I’d done. “You sleep now,” I told her.
    She nodded, and I turned the television on to the Shopping Network, Mom’s favorite channel. Then I walked back into the