Read Everything We Ever Wanted for Free Online Page B

and I called 911.” About a week later, after Charles’s dad had died, Charles tracked down the agency that employed the building’s cleaning staff and asked for the woman’s name. The agency was evasive, saying that the woman had quit and they didn’t have a forwarding number.
Maybe she was in this country illegally. Maybe she felt guilty and embarrassed that she had come upon such a thing—an executive limp and lifeless on a bathroom floor, soaked in his own urine. But the woman was out there, certainly, and she had information Charles wanted. If only he could see her and ask her about his father’s final moments of consciousness. Had he said anything? Regrets, maybe? A sudden confession of love?
The hand on his watch slid to the three. Charles peeled his body from the wall, straightened his shirt, and prepared to go back to work. The sun came out for a moment, turning the marble fountain base in front of his building amber. An exact match, Charles realized, to his dad’s headstone.
     

 

     
     

    ………………………………………………………… three

 

     
     

     
    Normally Sylvie looked forward to the biweekly Tuesday board meetings at Swithin. She loved sitting in the library, drinking tea, plotting, and gossiping with the Philadelphia classical station on quietly in the background. It was less a board meeting and more a nice cozy get-together with people she’d known for years. But she dreaded this one, staying in the shower until the last possible moment. She found herself wishing the weather would abruptly turn biblically catastrophic, raining down frogs or locusts or bumblebees, forcing the Department of Transportation to close the roads. She longed for a sudden high fever, nothing dangerous, just a passing flu. She even took her temperature as she sat at the kitchen table, drinking her coffee.
    It was just that she needed a few more days. A little while longer to collect herself, to get her bearings. If only the biweekly board meeting was scheduled for next week instead. In a week, she’d be organized; everything would be in its place. She would have planned out everything she needed to say, a clever response to every prying, insolent, loutish question.
    James would know how to deal with this situation. He’d talk to Scott, or he’d at least try. He had been the one to encourage Scott to take the coaching position in the first place. At a fund-raiser last fall, a Swithin teacher and activities organizer approached Sylvie and James. “The wrestling team needs an assistant coach,” he said. “Would that be something your son might be interested in?” James stepped in, saying he was sure Scott would be happy to take it. Sylvie gawked at him. How did he know? That night, when James went into Scott’s apartment and shut the door, she heard them arguing through the wall. “Where do you get off, making decisions for me?” Scott roared. “How can you assume that’s what I want to do with my life?”
    Sylvie sighed, but she wasn’t surprised. Of course Scott was putting up a fight; James should have known better than to speak for him. James and Scott had been close when Scott was young, building things in the garage together, playing in the waves at the beach houses, sharing stories about wrestling matches, which they both had experience with, but then, around the time Scott was in high school—around the time of the Swithin awards ceremony Charles had referred to the night before—Scott abruptly stopped speaking to his father. Sylvie guessed James knew why Scott was angry at him, for he always seemed so contritely attentive to Scott, forever trying to clear the stale air between them, but it was yet another thing James and Sylvie never discussed. Maybe it was just that Scott was disinterested in all of them. And maybe, deep down, Sylvie felt a tiny bit grateful that her husband was suddenly as disconnected from their son as she was.
    But then, without explanation, Scott took