The Lola Quartet Read Online Free Page B

had been said by a parent named Gavin Sasaki, not a parent named Rose Thomas? He hadn't slept well since Florida. He was so tired tonight.
       "Go home," Julie had said, two hours earlier. She usually stayed much later but tonight she said she had a headache. She'd walked past his desk with her coat over her arm, going home to cook dinner in a microwave and listen to classical music with her eyes closed. "We're probably about to get laid off anyway." This had put him into a tailspin. But now a curious calm had come over him, and nightmare seemed excessive. He closed his eyes for a moment and then retyped it: The cuts in playground funding have been awful. It was eleven p.m. and he was almost alone here, the few night production people quiet at their desks, a janitor emptying trash cans.

    Rose Thomas walks the two blocks from her public housing unit to the neighborhood playground every morning. She moves slowly, her four-year-old daughter, Amy, at her side. Ms. Thomas would like to take her daughter to play somewhere else, but there's nowhere else to go.
    "I'll never understand why they thought they could cut funding," Ms. Thomas said on a recent morning, pushing her daughter on a swing. "Is having a safe place for my child to play really too much to ask?"

    Gavin had taken a few photographs of the playground. Not for the story— the paper would send a freelance photographer with a camera made in the current century— but for himself. He had the film developed later that week and he spent some time at his desk looking at the images, the rusted swing sets, paint flaking from the monkey bars. If his daughter was in the care of a stranger in Florida, then what had become of her mother? He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Anna. He'd been playing a concert behind the school with his high school jazz quartet, he remembered. She'd thrown a paper airplane at him through the dark.

Five

    T he last time Gavin had spoken with Anna, a little over ten years before Karen left him and his shower in New York started dripping, they were sitting together on the back porch of her house in Sebastian and his shirt was soaked to his back with sweat. Gavin was eighteen, in his last month of high school. At the end of summer he was going to New York City to study journalism. Anna still had a year of high school left and the weight of the conversation they hadn't had yet— the what happens to us now that we'll be in different states? talk— was opening up longer and longer silences between them.
       "Have you ever wanted to live somewhere colder?" Gavin asked, as a means of avoiding the conversation for at least a few more minutes or perhaps, he realized as he spoke, as a way of approaching it indirectly.
       " Where would I go? I've never left Florida."
       "I don't know," he said, "but I've been fantasizing about cold weather since I was five."
       "I love Florida." Anna's voice was languid. "Permanent summer." She was watching the fireflies rise up from the grass.
    "Don't you ever want seasons?"
       "You're just too pale and heat-sensitive. Summers are easy for everyone else."
       "I've heard that," Gavin said.
       "Well," she said, "you'll be leaving soon."
       Gavin took her hand. He heard voices at that moment somewhere in the house behind them, a shrill escalation and response. Anna's parents were fighting again.
       "When I saw you the other day," he said, "you said there was something you needed to tell me."
       He'd run into her in a school corridor. She'd seemed nervous and tense. But now she only shook her head, distracted. The tenor of the fight was growing louder and sharper. Anna and Gavin were silent for a moment, listening. Gavin watched the frantic fluttering of moths against the porch light.
       "Listen," Anna said, "maybe you should go."
       The screen door slammed and Anna's half-sister Sasha was outside. They shared the same volatile mother but had different fathers, and Gavin