Read My Life Among the Apes for Free Online Page A

his sleek back, his chest, his face. It didn’t feel like a first time. Afterwards, she easily fell asleep.
    HER PARENTS LIVED IN a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farm house in Newmarket. The lawn sloped down to the river where her father kept his canoe and rowboat. Some of the surrounding land was being developed into suburban housing but in back of the house, with the surrounding spruce trees and the willows by the water, it was possible for her to have the illusion that little had changed since her childhood. Her father was a retired high school science teacher; her mother had taught physical education and home economics. Their house, with its mismatched farm-sale furniture, worn rugs, and books, had long ago set her own tastes. Every friend she had ever brought here had immediately fallen in love with both the house and her parents, and when her father would start handing out the martinis at four o’clock, the friend would invariably ask to be adopted. What her friends saw, Chloe always thought, was no more or less valid than how any other household presented itself.
    She found her father reading
Scientific American
in a Muskoka chair, their golden lab at his feet. Her mother, in rubber knee pads, was weeding the garden. She and her father hugged lightly while her mother took off her gloves, saying she was glad for an excuse to stop. Her father asked whether she had decided yet about Princeton, giving her his “patented” look, meaning that he couldn’t imagine what was holding her up. Her mother changed the subject to Chloe’s sisters — to May, who had given up trying to get pregnant and was hoping to adopt a baby from China, and to Lauren, who had just started to date a year after her divorce.
    They asked her about Tim, who she had made the mistake of bringing up to visit and who had made almost too good an impression. She said nothing about Daniel, of whom they were less likely to approve. After an hour or so she grew restless and announced an intention to take out the canoe. “You won’t enjoy it,” her father said. “You can see all those new houses along the way. And now there’s always trash floating in the river.”
    She went anyway, the dog wagging anxiously from the shore as she pushed out. Her father was right about the garbage: she saw a floating Coke can, a broken chair, plastic bags snagged on the willow branches. She was an elegant canoeist and her strokes were almost silent. It didn’t surprise her when she started to cry, for she had felt it building for a couple of days. She drifted until she grew quiet again and then she turned around. By the time she reached her parents’ house, she had recovered.
    ON MONDAY MORNING, SHE RODE her old Schwinn bike to work in the rain. Liana put an Aretha Franklin tape on the stereo and made Chloe laugh by lip-syncing as she carried platters of eggs and home fries. The rain came down harder, pounding on the plate glass windows. All day, people threw themselves in through the doorway, hanging up their dripping coats. Cleaning up her last table, Chloe found an umbrella hooked to the back of a chair.
    “We scored a Gucci,” she said to Liana. “Unless it’s a fake.” “There must be four in the box already. Take your pick.” “I can’t see holding up an umbrella while I’m riding.”
    She went into the back storage room and pulled the lost-and-found box from under the counter. Amidst the single gloves and key chains and empty wallets she saw a Penguin edition of
Robinson Crusoe
. She reached in and picked it up, holding it close to her face. Carefully she turned the cover and saw the initials
GL
written on the corner of the first page.
    OF COURSE IT WAS HER duty to return the book to Gerry Lembeck’s family. It might only be a paperback, but it was one of his last possessions and might mean something to his wife or his children. In the white pages she found a listing for a G. Lembeck on Ava Road. She picked up the telephone receiver and hesitated.