The Miracles of Ordinary Men Read Online Free Page B

ground.
    â€œMom says lots of things.”
    â€œI don’t want you to get in trouble, Lilah.”
    â€œI’ll be fine, Timmy.”
    He sips his own hot chocolate. Foam clings to his lip. “Mom also says you’re going to leave.”
    He says this every day. “I’m going to leave sometime. Yeah.”
    â€œBut not right now.”
    â€œNo, not right now.”
    â€œIf you go,” he says, “no one will talk to me anymore.”
    â€œDon’t be silly.”
    â€œIt’s not silly. Mrs. Graham said it to Mom when she came over. When they thought I was in my room. She said,
He’s such a strange little boy.
”
    â€œMrs. Graham is a fat, smelly pig.”
    He giggles. But he is serious again so quickly, so young, so small. “I don’t want you to go.”
    â€œI’ll die if I stay here, Timmy.” Because this is honestly what she thinks — she’ll die, or she’ll marry that nameless boy she met at the party, and one day she’ll become Roberta, which is to say worse than dead. She is twenty years old, invincible and furious, selfish in the way that only the young can be. She doesn’t realize what she’ll be breaking, what she’ll be leaving behind. All she wants to do is disappear.
    â€”
    Now, these years later, she walks through the city and sees Timothy’s face everywhere — on the posters, in the grocery line, in every other ragged heap rocking on the street. He drifts through Vancouver like fog that lies close to the ground.
    She is like a detective, or an exotic birdwatcher — stalking the streets, looking for the flash of his pale skin, the hooked nose they both share with Roberta. Some days, she wanders the streets alone. But usually she finds him. She brings him food and clothing: a hat, a jacket for the rain. Maltesers,
because they are his favourite. A toothbrush from Roberta, who lies awake at night in Victoria wracked with thoughts of gum disease.
    He likes Stanley Park, and the streets that line the sand of English Bay. He haunts the bakeries scattered around the West End, because the bakery women feed him leftover cupcakes and sometimes the grates pump hot, flour-filled air into the cold stretch of early morning.
    â€œHow can you see anything?” she asks him one morning at five. The air is thick with flour. Timothy, hunched up against the side of the bakery, looks like a snow-dusted child. “This can’t possibly be good for you.”
    â€œIt’s just flour,” he says. As always, she is frightened by how small his voice is, by how much he is now the one disappearing. “I think it’s nice.”
    â€œNice,” Lilah echoes. She fingers the red fringes of her scarf and stares down at him. “This isn’t what I would call ‘nice,’
Timmy.”
    He doesn’t look at her. “That’s not my name.”
    â€œOf course it is. For God’s sake, Tim. Grow up.”
    He ignores her. He is good at ignoring her now. She makes a deep irritated sound in her throat, an impatient
hmph
, and then stops when she realizes that she sounds exactly like Roberta. “Mom’s worried about you,” she says. “We’re all
worried about you.”
    â€œWorrying will only take you so far,” he says, in one of his hard, unyielding flashes of clarity. “You can’t spend your life thinking about me.”
    â€œBut I can,” she shoots back. “I do
.
”
    â€œEven in Europe,” he says, his voice dull. “Even when you were travelling in Thailand, when all you ever did was yell at Mom and hang up the phone.”
    â€œYes,” she says, simply. “Why do you think I came back?”
    â€œYou were meant for better things,” Timothy says. He is eighteen years old now, but the sound that comes out of him belongs to a little boy. He clenches his hand into a fist and then lets his fingers unfurl. He is thin and