The Carnival at Bray Read Online Free

forehead, who stirred a little beneath the thin white sheet, her clothes in a pile on the floor, the soft outline of her breasts moving up and down with her breathing. They tiptoed out of the apartment, climbed back into AG BULLT, and drove to the Golden Nugget at Diversey and Clark. Kevin picked a vinyl booth by the window, and as they ate their breakfast, the sky beside them was a pink-dyed Easter egg turning an August blue above the flat rooftops of record stores and hookah shops.
    â€œSo, who was that blond girl?” Maggie asked, cutting into her French toast.
    â€œSonia? Ah, she’s nobody. A friend.”
    â€œIs Jeremy going to get you a bootleg tape of the show?”
    â€œNow why would I want one of those?” He plucked a bit of mushroom from his hobo skillet and wiped it on the edge of his plate.
    â€œI don’t know. He said he gets bootlegs of all the shows he goes to.”
    â€œJeremy’s a moron. Bootlegs totally defeat the purpose of going to a show. They take away from the preciousness of the lived experience. It happened. You were there for it. And now it’s
your
responsibility to remember it, not to try and re-create it all the time by listening to some shittily recorded attempt at preservation.” He pointed his fork at her. “Everything that ever happens to you only happens once, so you better never stop paying attention. Now eat your breakfast, kid.”
    He went back to picking at his skillet while Maggie nibbled her French toast and tried not to intrude on his mood, tried to hold in the magic of just being around him. She was glad to be Kevin’s niece. It meant that he would never go sneaking off into some morning without even saying good-bye to her.
    When they got home, Laura, Colm, and Nanny Ei were pacing the front stoop. There had been a fire in the laundry room at the Days Inn Milwaukee and they’d been evacuated. By the time they’d gotten the all-clear signal it was too late to go back to bed, so they’d driven home in the middle of the night and arrived at dawn to an empty apartment. Colm stood behind the two hysterical women with his arms crossed while Laura followed Maggie and Kevin into the house, picked up a sombrero-shaped ashtray, and chucked it at Kevin’s head. He ducked, and it shattered against the front room wall.
    â€œWhere the hell have you been? Are you
drunk?”
she demanded, grabbing Maggie’s arm.
    â€œNot at the moment,” Kevin responded.
    â€œYou should never have left her alone with him,” Colm said. He was looking at Kevin the way you’d look at an infected wound.
    Kevin opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. A look came over his face: the same hunted look he wore whenever his family got on his case about what a disappointment he was. He picked up the pieces of the sombrero ashtray, placed them on the coffee table, and walked into his room, closing the door quietly behind him.
    â€œAre you
okay?”
Laura demanded.
    Maggie nodded. She was more than okay. Not only was she no longer sick, she felt as if she’d just awoken from the long, safe torpor of her childhood. The night had blasted her free of that shell, and she had emerged new and raw and ready. She felt the ticket stub folded carefully in her pocket. How many kids in Bray would be able to say they’d stood just feet from Billy Corgan, that they’d been at the Metro for the
Siamese Dream
record release show, that they’d seen Lake Shore Drive on a Sunday morning through the prism of a concert comedown, the runners looking so silly with their skinny legs and their neon shorts, chugging along the footpath with their calorie counters and Gatorade?
    â€œWe had fun, ma,” said Maggie. “Nothing happened.”
    â€œI’ll
bet
it didn’t,” fumed Laura. “Get upstairs, you.”
    The night before they moved, Laura’s boss at Oinker’s, the neighborhood tavern where she bartended