The Last Talk with Lola Faye by Thomas H. Cook

Author:Thomas H. Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Sixteen

LIKE A CAR GOING OVER A BRIDGE, I repeated in my mind.

Lola Faye’s words tightened around me like a noose, and in that tightening, I thought of the shattered window, my father’s dead body on the kitchen floor, all that had happened after that, everything from that first murder to Julia’s departing words, Call me, Luke, when your past is in the past.

But where had it begun, Luke’s Journey?

While Lola Faye talked on about the vicissitudes of chance, how lives could turn on a dime, in car accidents, for example, or airplane crashes, I considered the somewhat less subtle twists my own life had taken.

Surely a great one had been when Miss McDowell mentioned Harvard, but what if I had taken no notice of what she’d said? What if I had been like Buddy McPharland, practically devoid of either ability or ambition? What if I had not been inspired first by my mother’s reading and later by my own? What if I’d never known that great men existed, or that there were men who wrote about great men, great events, who took the sweep of human life as their own lives’ work?

And what if someone at some point had tried to stay my hand, cool my brain, put things in perspective, or simply offer a word of caution? What if someone had said, Luke, be careful?

I wouldn’t have listened. I knew that I wouldn’t have listened even as Lola Faye droned on about the hairpin curves of life, now with other examples, the world’s grotesque fortuities great and small, all of this flowing from her mouth in a steady stream: illness, sudden death, chance encounters, all the unforeseen twists and turns that can derail a life.

No, I would not have listened, because I’d been in a fever of dreamy ambition and riotous hope, both of which were still blazing away when I arrived home that same evening, now mercifully relieved of any further duties at Variety Store by my father’s decision to hire a new girl.

My mother stopped washing dishes when I came storming through the door nearly breathless with anticipation.

“What is it, Luke?”

“Miss McDowell,” I said. “I had a talk with Miss McDowell.”

From there, I told my mother everything Miss McDowell had said to me, that I was gifted, that I could get into Harvard, maybe even get a scholarship, that there was a road I could take, and that this road would lead to the fulfillment of my dream. It had gushed from me, all of this, and it had flowed around and over my mother. I could see it in her eyes, how fully she absorbed every word I said, how she shared this dream, how united we were in the pursuit of it.

When I finally exhausted myself, she stepped away from the sink and drew me into her arms. “You’re on your way, Luke,” she said. She tightened her arms around me, as if sealing in my grand ambition, and while she had me locked in

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