What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Read Online Free Page A

isn’t that good and they can’t reach the tops of anything. Father Weatherford won’t let them use a ladder for fear one of them will fall off and break her hip. I imagined Felix cleaning those little glass panes one by one and wondered how long it had taken.
    After church, Lily and I had plans to go up to the river to swim. About twenty people were holding a peace vigil in front of the park when we drove through town. They were just standing there with anti-war signs. The hardware store across the street had a big flag banner and a bunch of yellow ribbons in the display window, and the manager was standing outside, glaring at the people with the signs.
    “Did you know Jesse Francis?” I asked Lily.
    “Not really.”
    “Mom says he’s coming back to finish his senior year of high school. How weird is that?”
    “That’s beyond weird. High school would be like living on Mars after you’d been in the army, I’d think. Didn’t he already get his GED?”
    “Mom says Jesse’s mother told her he just sits in his room and draws mazes in his journal and she’s hoping that if he goes back to high school he can figure out how to be a kid again.”
    “Man, I doubt it,” Lily said.
    “Yeah, I don’t see how you could either. But Mom says colleges like to see a diploma and not a GED, and that’s why he decided to go back.”
    “And I thought you weren’t talking to your mom.”
    “We have negotiated the terms of a truce,” I said. “She doesn’t try to get me to live at Wuffie’s house and I don’t nag her about Ben.”
    “If she actually gets divorced, that’s going to get a little bizarre.”
    “Yeah. Mostly I’m hoping it means she’s not really going to go through with it.”
    “Is she seeing anybody else?” Lily asked.
    “She has coffee with a homeless guy who lives in the basement at St. Thomas’s. I don’t really think you can count that.”
    “No,” Lily agreed. “You can’t count that.”
    I hoped you couldn’t. When we got to the river, the swimming hole was full. Some kids we knew were climbing up to jump off the big tawny rocks that jut out over the water. We kind of half waved at them—one of them was Noah Michalski—and spread our towels out on the bank. Lily waded in and I followed her, pushing out into the cool water. It was too murky to see the bottom, but it’s over your head in the middle. Lily floated on her back with her pale hair spreading out around her, waving its tendrils in the current. A shower of manzanita leaves drifted down on my head and I looked up to see Noah Michalski hopping up and down and making ape noises.
    “Mature,” I said, and he just laughed. Noah is really cute, but he’s an idiot. He has blond hair and green eyes and a sort of Superman curl over his forehead, and all he thinks about is sex and exploding things. He acts like he still likes me. I can’t imagine why, because I told him I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire. When I fall in love it will be with someone I can trust, not someone who will trash me to make himself look like a stud. And then I won’t leave him for some stupid reason like Mom keeps doing.
    I flopped onto my back like Lily and closed my eyes, just drifting on the surface of the water, paddling with my hands a bit now and then to keep from floating downstream out of the pool. A bunch of little kids were running up and down along the bank throwing gravel on each other. I could smell somebody else cooking hot dogs. The sky was that bright robin’s egg blue with the sun not even thinking about going down behind the mountains, as if it would stay up there all summer, and summer wouldn’t end.

3
    But on Tuesday of course we were in school—so much for never-ending summer. At least I’m not going to the school where Mom teaches anymore. I’m looking forward to buying Twinkies from the vending machine without getting a long, soulful discussion about healthful eating. On the other hand, in middle school we were the big