The Weight of Stones Read Online Free Page B

rhetorical questions gathered across a lifetime hanging there in an empty room. Why had he not even considered getting bunk beds?
    If I could go back, he thought, I would build the thing myself. The best bunk bed in the neighbourhood, all the kids would want to sleep over at Gavin McKelvey’s...
    He could see the lengths of pine, how the ladder would fit against the side with a set of brackets, and a runner so that you could slide it back and forth. He settled back onto the bed and closed his eyes tight. He felt the sting of a tear roll from the corner of his eye and slide down his cheek to the pillow. He tucked his hands between his knees to rock himself, and in this way he negotiated sleep.

Five
    T he alarm sounds, and McKelvey slaps the top of the little black box, giving himself the gift of another eight minutes of lostness. When the second buzzer sounds, he finally opens his eyes and stares at the stucco on the ceiling with its familiar shadows. He collects his bearings; is it Tuesday or Wednesday? Time shifts, and days melt into weeks. Mondays are born and suddenly bloom into Friday afternoons. There is comfort to be found in the mundane routines.
    He pulls himself from the cocoon of covers, steps numbly into the shower, slides a razor down his face, pats his cheeks with whatever cologne Caroline bought him for Christmas last year. He stands in front of the fogged mirror dabbing a piece of tissue on a nick. Stands back to adjust the sports coat that is too tight in the armpits. He feels hot, stuffy. He practices nodding, smiling a few times, until he feels like a meteorologist on a local cable channel, searching for a middle ground between contrived and genuine. And so he meets the day...

    McKelvey stood there in front of the mirror the same as he did every morning, adjusting and re-adjusting his tie. And still it was too short, three inches above his belt line. He undid the tangle and worked at it again. His thick fingers—ode to a few generations of McKelvey manual laborers, miners mostly—were not designed for this sort of fine work. He had never slipped a tie around his neck and made it the correct length in one attempt; it was always an event, a flail of silk. How many years had he been doing this, for godsake? Caroline used to laugh at him and, when he was old enough, Gavin, too. The kid said his fingers were like fat sausages...
    â€œSausages,” McKelvey said aloud, and was startled by the sound of his own voice.
    Finally satisfied with the result, he brushed a few flakes of dandruff from the shoulders of his navy sports coat and regarded himself for a moment. He thought he looked old and heavy, and he was heavy, over two-fifteen now. There were pouches beneath his blue eyes, dark circles, bloodshot eyes. His face was evolving, morphing into his father’s face. The same width, the same creases at the jowls, the same wrinkles across the forehead from a lifetime of scowling. He leaned in to check his teeth, and they looked the way old people’s teeth begin to look: narrowing, dying. He hadn’t slept well, his mind working through the coming events of the day. It was to be a day of reckoning. At last, a beacon at the end of the long dark road. All of the work, all of the tears, all of the silent angst bottled under pressure. Two years of bulldog determination, countless hours of unpaid overtime logged pouring over files, drawing the connections. He had pushed it as far as he could push it, working angles from the sidelines, and the doggedness had brought him to the point of being written up for accessing files without authorization. The files concerned the murder investigation of his son, so Aoki had let the infraction begin and end at her desk. It was one cop doing another cop a favour. Any father would be interested in his son’s murder investigation, more so if the father happened to be the police. But even so, McKelvey believed there was some word out there about his level of