Read Falling Together for Free Online

loved this place. It had been the setting for some intense family ugliness over the years, and this very porch was the spot where his friendship with Pen had ended, smashed to smithereens, but the place itself had stayed pure, calm and unstained. Will felt oddly glad for it, glad that its days of bearing witness to meanness or betrayal or to the icy, cutting conversations that had been his father’s specialty were over.
    “Okay, how about this? Sometimes, I worry that you’ll change so much I won’t know you anymore,” he had said finally. “Some of those friends of yours, they’re nice, but they’re a little…”
    “Humorless?” his mother offered. “Annoyingly earnest? Overly huggy?”
    “Yeah, that,” said Will, laughing.
    “Say more. What else worries you?”
    “Apart from your maniacal insistence on openness and communication, you mean?”
    “Yes.” She folded her hands and smiled innocently, waiting. “Apart from that.”
    “All right, all right.” He thought for a few seconds, listening to the bees hum like tiny engines. “I’m getting used to the yoga and the vegetarianism. I can see the point of them. But the really hard-core New Age stuff makes me—” He searched for the right words ( itch uncontrollably, vomit, run like hell ), then gave up. “I want you to be happy, and you should do whatever it takes. I’ll adjust.”
    “But from a purely selfish perspective…,” prompted his mother.
    “You should get a job with the KGB. Seriously.”
    “I believe the KGB was dissolved some time ago. As you were saying.”
    Will picked a leaf of mint off the surface of his iced tea and chewed it.
    “From a purely selfish perspective, I’d say that I just want to keep feeling like we speak the same language. And I want you to stay funny.”
    His mother slapped the table and laughed. Then she leaned toward him and said, “How about this? Yoga, vegetarianism, and maybe just a bit of Buddhism. Tibetan. The joyful kind. But no crystals, personal gurus, or star charts.”
    Will raised his eyebrows. “Goddesses?”
    “Nope.”
    “Vortices?”
    “Don’t know what they are.”
    “Wicca?”
    “Never.”
    “What’s your position on modern medicine?”
    “All for it. Deal?”
    “Deal.”
    Now, out in his backyard, his mother finished her sun salutation, started walking toward the house, and then leaned forward, squinting, her hands on her knees. Will wondered what she was looking at. It was so much brighter outside than it was in his office; no way could she see him. Then she smiled and blew a kiss in his direction. Will was highly skeptical about things like sixth sense and intuition, but when it came to her kids, his mother could be downright uncanny. This hadn’t always been true, but it was true now. Even though he didn’t believe she could possibly see him do it, he waved.
    She didn’t come straight to the office but went instead to the kitchen. Will heard her turn on the water, then clatter around, unscrewing the lids off the small, round metal canisters that held her loose tea leaves and herbs.
    Will knew that she would come into his office in a few minutes, would lean against the doorjamb in her paint-streaked shirt, and tell him that she’d finished the last illustration for his new book. She had been close to finished last night, and he was pretty sure she had gotten up before sunrise that morning to paint. It amazed him, how little sleep she needed now, especially since one of the primary ways he remembered her from his childhood was as a long, sloped lump under sheets. He could see himself—he could transport himself into himself—at six, ten, fifteen, standing next to the guest-room bed or next to the couch in what she called her studio, even though she almost never used it for making art, staring at her and churning with worry and anger, his hands dangling, as full daylight sliced in around the drawn curtains.
    Soon she would come in with her tea, say she had finished the