The Boy Read Online Free Page A

cash register and coolly counted out one hundred eighty-two dollars and fifty-four cents. Anna had no trouble remembering her reserves at age five: they consisted strictly of IOUs, money she owed her sister, so she’d peered down incredulously. “Where’d you get that stash?”
    “Some I earned, some I got given,” had been Eva’s arch reply. Challenged to prove it, her little girl had started accounting for every penny until, not even a quarter of the way through, Anna had begged for mercy.
    The sun rose above the portal and soon it was time to run, the dog having taken position by the door at the stroke of eight, stolid and stoic in his determination not to be left behind. Eva stood by him in silence, lunch box held primly in both hands, as Anna ran cursing from room to room, looking for a book, then for the car keys, and finally for her cell phone. They ran to the truck—dog first, Eva second, Anna third—and proceeded in a flurry of accusations and recriminations—all voiced by Eva, who hated to be late for school—past the post office and over the bridge toward town. “We’ll get there on time,” Anna swore, “I promise you we’ll get there on time,” which, barring a few exceptions, all recorded in Eva’s jagged handwriting on the fridge, they never failed to do, pulling up just as Eva’s classroom door inched shut.
    “Did you get to school on time?” Eva’s father acquired the habit of asking every time he rang.
    “Kinda.”
    “Eva, my love, there is such a thing as an alarm clock. I am afraid it will be up to you to purchase one.”
    “Mamma, Daddy says we need an alarm clock,” Eva said with serious eyes. After the fourth or fifth reminder, Anna grabbed the phone from her hand. “What’s the endless fascination, the gnawing obsession? You want an alarm clock? Get yourself an alarm clock. Get the Swiss kind. I hear they work better.”
    “I have an alarm clock, Anna. It rings at precisely four-thirty in the morning.”
    “Get yourself another one. Maybe two will do the trick.”
    He put a Swiss one in the mail and Eva laid it gingerly, still unwrapped, in her room, between a framed portrait of him in high spirits and a handful of sand dollars they’d stolen together from a rising tide.
    “Did you get the alarm clock I sent?” he asked the next time he called.
    Eva shrugged.
    “Sorry, my love, did you hear what I said?”
    Filtered through wires and cables and circuit boards, not to mention land and air and dark matter both unmeasured and unclaimed, Eva’s father’s voice somehow rang out as if through a megaphone.
    “Did you hear what I said?”
    Anna began wiping down the kitchen counter.
    “I put it in my room,” Eva said in her small voice.
    “Sorry, my love, in whose room did you put it?”
    “My room.”
    “May I speak to your mother?”
    Anna signaled wildly no.
    “Mamma’s in the shower.”
    “Darling, what’s the alarm clock doing in your room?”
    “I put it next to your picture, Daddy, and next to the sand dollars,” and through silence that struck like a sandstorm, Anna heard, distinctly, the encumbered beating of the girl’s heart.
    “You want me to set the alarm clock?” Anna asked gently after Eva got off the phone.
    “No,” said Eva, and like other things—the first-aid kit Anna never got around to ordering, the educational wooden blocks she never got around to buying, the ski helmet she saw no point in spending money on—the subject was dropped, no action ever taken.
    “This is the beauty of hemispheres,” she told a friend whose recently divorced husband had just dropped off a drum set for their five-year-old. “They separate you from your ex.”
      
    Alone with the dog in the car, Anna let her forehead rest briefly on the steering wheel. Then, pushing out a long breath, she rolled down Ben Romero Road. At the highway, she took a left toward the food store.
    They must have met a while back, she and the boy, before he’d gone off to college,