The Constant Heart Read Online Free Page A

bridge.
    â€œSo, how’s your father?” she said.
    â€œOK,” I said.
    â€œThat chocolate thing was pretty fucking good,” said Sara.
    â€œWhat happens if I take the bet, spend the night in there, and still feel the same way about you?”
    â€œNo promises, Jake,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the way it’s going to be.”
    â€œLet the bet resolve that,” I said.
    Sarah stood on the dictionaries and stared at me like women prosecutors on TV.
    The women’s prison glowed a deep yellow as the sun hit its cheap bricks.
    â€œYeah,” said Sara. “Won’t this be something? I’ll start this afternoon. The first thing is to throw her another joint.”
    â€œBut you’re up to something, too,” I said.
    She turned those green eyes on me.
    â€œThat’s right, Mr. Junior Astronomer. I’m going to prove
what ‘atoms in a void’ means. Nothing more. See? Then we can just forget all this nonsense about you holding my hand and maybe me feeling some bullshit everyone tells me is bullshit.”
    We leaned together. Pigeons, like prayers or just flecks of dust, flew around the prison.
    â€œBut,” I said, “a bet isn’t a one-way thing.”
    â€œI knew you would come up with something,” she said. “You just have to make things complicated.”
    â€œYou didn’t answer me. You just gave me an opinion. If I go in there, if I take the dare, and I come out and I still want to sit here with you, what then?”
    â€œWe’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” she said. “After you get tested for every known STD, and after they do research for new ones. Which you will probably be carrying by then. Why, you can probably get things from just sitting on those sheets over there. If they have sheets.”
    She wouldn’t give in. Wouldn’t admit that there was even a possibility that something existed, that something real was in that touch of my hand on her arm. Classic dissonance: She believed one thing and felt another.
    She put her chin on the sill and looked through the glass of the window, so cloudy and dirty that it seemed like a cataract.
    â€œYeah,” she said. “I bet I can get you in from the back, by the garbage chute. Come back tomorrow. Oh boy, are you going to have a story to tell.”
    She stepped down from the pile of books and went up the aisle between the shelves, the walls of them seeming more confining than before, still musty, still filled with mysteries,
as though just sitting on the shelf had given them some substance they hadn’t had before. She ran her finger along them, then put it in her mouth, and then touched the books again and tasted her finger, as though the taste of knowledge was exciting.
    It took about five minutes, but Sara went downstairs, got buzzed out by Mrs. Kilmer, who probably gave her a look of hatred perfectly mixed with envy, and I am sure Sara swayed her hips for Mrs. Kilmer just the way she did when she appeared on the street, on the sidewalk, between the library and the prison. She had that sultry walk, her posture perfect, as though she had been a model. The traffic had a dreary, daily business cadence, delivery trucks and taxicabs and people on the way to buy new tires, new coffee makers, and the like. It made Sara stand out even more: I want to say she had something of the goddess about her, but maybe that was just youth. Or the power that an attractive young woman possesses: too big to be summed up, like those pictures from the Hubble. At the end of the block, by the wall of the prison, where the distance between the fence and the yellow bricks of the place was most narrow, Sara stopped and put her hands on her hips: She was impatient, she seemed to say, and she didn’t have all the time in the world. What were prisons to her? The woman with the blond hair waved. Sara waved back. Then Sara flicked the joint, like