The Best I Could Read Online Free Page A

“Maybe
we should have said something.”
    “It wouldn’t have helped,” Jet muttered. “Dad
was determined to join Mom. We can’t blame ourselves.”
    My sister hiccupped. “Then we can blame Mom.
He left us to be with her.”
    “Deena!” Jet and I cried.
    “Stop it!” she screamed. “I hate them! I can
do that! I can hate them, damn it! I’m not either one of you!”
    Hetty hit the brakes on the van, throwing us
forward against our seatbelts. “You’re allowed to be angry, Deena,
but not if it makes you hate the world.”
    “Screw all of you!” my sister yelled.
    Other than Deena’s tears, there was no desire
to cry. We were beyond that. We just wanted to bury our father, to
let his soul join our mother’s on the other side. We wanted to move
on. Deena’s anger, however, held us back. It kept us stuck in a
place none of us wanted to visit.
    My eyes met the road beyond,
my nose wrinkling. Deena was right, the van stank. It smelled like
wet dog, old blood, and piss. Outside the window, you could just
make out the words Refuge Animal
Hospital scrawled in green down the side of
the tan exterior.
    A Porsche pulled to a stop at a traffic light
next to us, and I found myself staring down at a young, red-haired
driver. He glanced up, caught my gaze, and grinned. In the
passenger seat, a vaguely familiar guy looked up, his gaze
following his friend’s to my face.
    I stiffened. Eli, the roof guy.
    We stared. I need a boat, my eyes
beseeched, to sail far away from this
place. This mess. My family.
    The red-haired boy’s lips moved. Eli
answered, his eyes narrowing on mine.
    “Is that the guy from the hospital?” my
brother asked from the front seat. “The one you were talking to on
the roof?”
    “Yeah,” I murmured.
    “Who?” Deena asked, leaning over me. “The
redhead or the brunette?”
    The light changed, and the van lurched
forward, breaking my eye contact with Eli.
    No, he’s mine, I thought. Not in a romantic way, but a frantic,
escape route way. Which was crazy. Completely crazy.
    “The brunette,” I said finally. “He was just
some guy on the roof.”
    “Oh,” Deena breathed,
disappointed. “And here I was hoping something interesting had happened
today.”
    My throat worked, misery choking it.
    Our dad’s death wasn’t enough for you.
    Anger at my sister detonated inside of me,
but I shoved it down. Maybe she was right to be so hateful. Maybe
it was the rest of us who were wrong.
    I wanted to hate Dad, but I couldn’t. I
pitied him. In the end, before he’d gone to the hospital, I’d sat
next to him, my fingers entwined with his.

    “I’m sorry I couldn’t be stronger, Tansy,”
Dad whispered. “I did the best I could. I just don’t know how to be
here without her. You get that, don’t you?”
    A tear slipped down his face, the pain of it
slicing an excruciating trail down my heart and soul.
    “Yeah, Dad, I get it. It’s got to hurt, huh?
To love someone that much?”
    “You have no idea,” he answered.

    My feelings were split in half. On one hand,
I envied my dad his love for my mother. What would it be like to
love someone so much?
    On the other hand, I felt like he was a
coward. Wouldn’t it be braver to keep their love alive? Wouldn’t it
be braver than letting it die with him?
    No resentment. Only pity and
disappointment.
    I sighed, words spilling forth with the
exhale, “Say hello to Mom, Dad.”
    If anyone in the van heard me, they said
nothing. Even my sister. Love wasn’t tearing Dad into pieces
anymore, and I couldn’t be angry about that. Not that part. That
part relieved me.
    Dad had been a car, Mom the tires. When she
left, Dad couldn’t keep driving once the wheels were flat. Instead
of pumping gas into his system, he’d started pumping poison.
    Like Romeo and Juliet.
    Being the child of a tragic romance was like
standing on top of a spinning globe waiting on it to fall off of
its axis.
    “I’ve got to go back to the university after
the funeral,”