Read The Second Life of Samuel Tyne for Free Online

I was your age back in Gold Coast, I once despised a class so much that I asked permission to go to the bathroom and never returned.” He laughed to himself, having not thought of the incident in years. “Oh, how my uncle beat me when he found out.” He paused. “I was so precocious—like my uncle. Like you.”
    Yvette continued to look at him. Disquieted by her stiffness, he frowned and returned to his work. “Those were indeed the days.”
    They sat in silence, the iron smell of solder filling the little wooden room. It wasn’t long before Samuel was so preoccupied he began to feel alone. He felt like the only man in the world to whom permanence still meant something. This gutted radio in front of him, this junk, was a trifle, a mere grain of the greater work these hands were capable of. He’d wasted his prime years as a trifler, and there was something intolerable in the thought that life would see him to the grave on such meagre achievements.
    “Yvette, what would you think of a change of surroundings?” said Samuel.
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    He nodded, continuing to solder. He’d believed somehow that she would respond more enthusiastically, even given her reserved nature. Perhaps it was because he’d always sensed a similar discomfort in her, a feeling of being limited by these sad surroundings, this inert life. He recalled an afternoon when, returning from a particularly tortuous workday, he’d heard the tinny noise of a radio he’d just fixed and followed the sounds to the living room. There, with Maud’s tea towels fastened to their heads like veils and wearing scratched brown sunglasses, stood the twins, dancing. Clutching his work files and his broken umbrella, Samuel watched them jerk to the music. He fell against the jamb, laughing so athletically he thought he would strain himself.
    “Young Tragedy and Comedy are discovering their likeness to sheiks,” he declared.
    “To shakes!” said Yvette, misunderstanding him. And they embellished their fits with a shake and shuffle that nearly suffocated Samuel in his laughter.
    Only later did Maud tell him that their headscarves were really an attempt to duplicate the hair of their classmates, and that she’d eavesdropped on a conversation in which Yvette had said she “got tired of being black.” Tired of the sugary way she had to behave to get people to play with her. Tired of being asked where she was really from, tired of being talked to as though she didn’t speak English.
    That saddened Samuel. He turned to where Yvette sat on the shed floor; she gazed back as indifferently as before. Put off by this, and lacking any real words of wisdom, Samuel returned to his work, only speaking again when she rose to leave.
    “Please do not tell your mother that you saw me here.”
    Yvette’s reaction surprised him: the request seemed to hurt her feelings. But she went out wordlessly.
    At the precise time of 4:49, Samuel stood from his bench to shake the wrinkles from his pants. He smoothed out his jacket, put on his overcoat, looped his worn briefcase over his forearm. Spitting in his kerchief he ran it across his face and, tucking it in his pocket, returned to the house.
    Just outside the storm door, before boarding the stoop, he heard girlish voices. Surprised, he paused to listen for a minute.
    “… set your friends on us,” hissed one of the twins.
    “I didn’t. I swear I didn’t,” said a nervous, quite striking voice. It was the voice of early womanhood, still childish, but with the base notes of a cello.
    “We know who cracks the whip,” said the ruddy voice so obviously Chloe’s.
    Ashamed of his daughters’ behaviour, Samuel walked in to put a stop to it. Yvette and Chloe sat staggered on the stairs leading to the bedrooms, their knees drawn up as though a fortress of bodies. On the very bottom step sat a tall, lithe girl of undeniable beauty. When the twins had made such a friend, or any friend at all for that matter, he