Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge

Author:Jim Dodge [Jim Dodge]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781847677136
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1987-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

Dear Parents of Second Graders

The second grade is having a classroom Halloween Party on the afternoon of October 31. Students are encouraged to wear their costumes to the party. The Halloween Party will be held during the last two hours of class time. Students will be dismissed at the regular time unless Rainy Day Session applies. Buses will run on normal schedule.

I wish you all a scary (but safe!) Halloween.

Sincerely,

Judy Gollawin

Second Grade Teacher

The note really tore me up. One happily mindless mistake and the party’s over, kid. A single misstep and you break through the crust. I got back in the car and slumped against the wheel and let the tears roll. Not sniveling, or not to my sense of it. Crying because it hurt.

You might be able to grieve forever, but you can’t weep that long, so after a while I wiped away the tears, folded up the note and put it in the glovebox with Harriet’s letter, and got myself turned around and back on the road, taking it up till the needle quivered between the double zeros of 100. This might’ve been terrifying if I’d stopped to think, the slowest mind in the west going that fast, hellbent for glory, goddamn it, no matter if I had to stop and weep at every scrap of paper that blew across my path, every sweet kid skipping off to school, every splash of blood on the highway.

Within twenty miles I was overtaken by an undreamable feeling of peace, no doubt a combination of raw exhaustion and emotional release, but I didn’t try to figure it out. I realized, to my baffled delight, that I’d blundered into a wobbling balance, a vagrant equilibrium, a fragile poise between water and moon, and I was riding the resolution of a wave.

It was a short ride, about an hour and a half between the last tear and Posthole Joe’s, and it felt so good I slowed down to savor it. As I passed Oklahoma City there was still an hour before sunset, but under a sky grown so leaden through the afternoon that it was almost dark, only a faint pinkish light, the ghost color of my florid hat, was holding at the horizon.

My peace deepened when I pulled into the lot at Posthole Joe’s. The long, flat-roofed diner was the same dingy white with tired red trim, the light inside still softened to an inviting glow by the exhaust-grimed glass of the windows. Two Kenworths and a White Freightliner idled in the lot. This was a memory exactly as I remembered it, familiar and sure, a reference solidly retained, and it gladdened me that something had prevailed against change. As I walked toward the door my peaceful happiness began expanding into a sense of elation I could neither understand nor contain, only welcome. When I stepped into the warmth and rich tangle of odors inside and saw Kacy standing just to my left – tall loose blond, lovelier than I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.