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.”Katherine’s mother nodded in agreement.Jeffrey asked all of the expected questions, but his father-in-law waited until the next piece of music was over before he started up again.“What are we going to do down in Washington? Live in a place next door to you and Katherine? And when everyone in Washington picks up, are we all going to head down to North Carolina together? Or Florida? What then?” Katherine’s father waved his hands around the room.“This is our home.We have too many memories here.You don’t care about that stuff yet, you’re still young,”—he laughed—“fairly young, so you don’t care about those things.But you will.You’re still too busy living your life to know the importance of the memories you’ve built around yourself.Katherine’s mother and I don’t need to go to Washington.I don’t even like Washington.Too many snotty people.”“When you get to be our age,” Katherine’s mother said, “you kind of regain that sense of invincibility you had when you were a kid, except you know how vulnerable you are and you just don’t care.”Her husband added: “I grew up listening to my grandfather tell stories about how much the Great Depression affected him.He was never the same afterwards.It haunted him for the rest of his life.He saw people starving in the streets, people throwing themselves out of high-rise windows.By the time World War II started, he wasn’t affected by it the way everyone else was.It drove my mother insane because, to her, it was the end of the world.It always infuriated her that my grandparents took it all with a grain of salt.It was the same way for me, being a kid in the ‘seventies.All the riots, the protests.Every night there was more footage on the news of the police beating protestors and of body bags being unloaded from giant cargo planes on their way back from Nam.I hadn’t lived through the things my grandparents had lived through, so for me, I thought it was the end of the world.My grandfather just smiled at me.I was scared when I was young so that now I can be brave.Brave isn’t the right word.I’m not brave, I’m just not afraid.We have everything we need right here.”Jeffrey said, “Katherine will never leave without you.”“She’ll have to.”“Help her move on,” Katherine’s mother said.“Don’t let her focus on what’s here and what she’s leaving behind.Help her focus on what’s still to come.That’s what’s important.”**He spent the day doing nothing but watching the waves come in and then go back out again.He was staring at the water but he was thinking about Galen’s burned corpse rotting in the abandoned city.His boy, his only son, would never be buried or even tossed in a yellow body bag.The charred remains would be rained on, eaten by flies, snowed on, picked apart by crows, until there was nothing left but bone.After turning the final page of The Awakening, he thought it perfectly reasonable to want to walk out into the water and simply disappear into its depths.Each wave beckoned him before retreating back into the ocean.God help him if he read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter while he was in a similar mood.Things wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have gone a single day without wondering which part of the stadium Galen was rotting away in.Had he been near where the flames started and died fairly quickly? Or was he in the bleachers, forced to sit there and wait for the flames to spread through the other sections first, enveloping row upon row of Blocks before getting to him? Had Galen died of smoke inhalation before the first flames touched his precious skin, or had he waited patiently in his wheelchair as the fire slowly crept up his legs? Was there anything left of him, or had the bodies all melted together in a twisted collection of blackened limbs? Jeffrey couldn’t get the thoughts out of his head.He tried to imagine his son on the porch with him.The birds would be chirping, the dogs barking somewhere down at the end of the street.He remembered it all as best as he could, but when he imagined Galen there with him, it wasn’t his boy that was there, but his burned remains.And so he said goodbye to the front porch where he spent each night with Galen.He said goodbye to Tyler State Park and even to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.Occasionally, not often, he wondered what Katherine was doing now.It was doubtful that she would have gone back to their house.Maybe she went to her parents so they could help rationalize what she had done.Knowing her, she would beg and plead with them until they gave up their own plans to stay behind in order to make her happy.Maybe she was living by herself in a house just outside Washington.None of it mattered.Cleaning pebbles off his pants, he stood up and went back to the tank.Each day, the roads became less reliable.His progress up the coast, already slow, became even slower.If the tank had to go three miles an hour, that was fine with him.Sometimes when he was driving he would smell an animal’s carcass hidden in the forest and be reminded of what his son’s flesh might have smelled like before the flies started picking it apart.Other times, the tank’s engine would make a popping noise and he thought of what it must have sounded like as Galen’s skin boiled in the inferno.The tank passed through mile after mile of forgotten highway.Not a single car approached on its way home from a long day at work.No delivery trucks raced away on their final drop-off of the day so they too could get home.It was just him, alone.He came to a collection of tents set up just off the road.Three of the seven tents had collapsed in a heap on nylon and space-age fabric.The other four were still in good condition [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]