The Weight of Stones Read Online Free

underpants on.
    â€œThis tastes like somebody’s chewed gum,” he said and spat a mouthful into the sink. He poured the rest of it down the drain and moved to the fridge to wash the taste away with Diet Coke. He drank straight from the plastic bottle, four big swallows that burned and fizzed down his throat.
    â€œI hate when you do that,” Caroline said without looking up. “Ever heard of germs?”
    â€œYou should see some of the stuff I touch in a day,” he said, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his dress shirt.
    And he saw himself through a vivid and stark lens, all the places he had been in a lifetime on the job, the rooms and hallways, all the things his hands had touched, the bloodied doorknobs and the bloodied cribs...
    â€œI can just imagine.”
    â€œOh,” he said, “I don’t know that you can.”
    She finished the line she was writing, then she closed the book and held it to her chest, saying, “I’m going to go draw a bath. Do you want it after I’m done?”
    McKelvey shook his head.

Four
    I n the sombre hours between midnight and dawn, within the sleep that falls like the weight of the dead, McKelvey lost himself completely. It was the best destination, his one luxury at the end of a day that seemed to last a lifetime, hour by hour, minute by minute. Sometimes he saw the rest of his life in this way, as a series of days stacked like folded card chairs against some long table. It was his job to walk along that table, unfolding a single chair at a time, preparing a place for guests unknown, and the table had no end; it faded to infinity. It was just something to do. The way he saw his job lately, the endless hours logged to lay charges that would be turned into plea bargains or else dropped altogether. The way he saw his life at home. Hour by hour, minute by minute. Nothing came easy.
    Then McKelvey startled awake from the same dream he’d been having every few weeks since his son’s murder. There was no schedule to the dream, but it always returned, and it never changed. It was a dream of innuendo, shadows and murmured voices. There was no direction to it, no line to follow, as though it had been conjured in the mind of a drunk. There was only the residue of something not quite right, the pressure of impending doom, unnameable yet undeniable. Like the sick feeling he’d got in his belly as a child when he knew he’d done something to someone , but couldn’t quite recall the particulars of the trespass.
    He woke in a cold sweat, the sheets twisted around his legs, his breath raspy and chest clenched like a fist.
    The neighbour’s dogs barked and howled at the night, their empty-belly sounds made all the more stark by the late night silence of the street. Maybe somebody’s cat was passing along the fence line, raising its arse in a taunt the way cats taunt a dog that is safely penned or chained. Then the barking ceased, and silence fell once again. McKelvey blinked to orient himself, wiped his face, turned to be sure his wife was still sleeping, and slipped out of the bed and down the hall to the room that had been his son’s bedroom for seventeen years— up to and until the teen’s poor attitude, anti-social behavior and escalating drug use had popped the McKelvey family bubble of security and success. This was, they were assured, happening all the time inside seemingly happy suburban homes, a family’s dream of earned contentment ripped open when a child or children passed with great difficulty beyond the stage of cute smiles and teeth too big for their mouths. Most kids made it through the minefield of adolescence a little wiser but without much serious trouble. They talked back a little, tried their hand at shoplifting or drew detention for skipping classes, got sick from smoking a joint at lunch in somebody’s garage. But there was a minority, McKelvey knew from his day job and his own life, that