Running the Risk Read Free Page A

me.”
    â€œDo you get high a lot?”
    â€œNot usually. Today seemed different.”
    â€œThen I must be a bad influence on you,” I said.
    â€œHey, lighten up,” she said.
    And then she kissed me hard on the mouth.

Chapter Five
    We sat on a bench in the park and made out for a while. Jeanette was very stoned and very sexy. I began to consider what I’d been missing. It occurred to me that the girl was trouble but I didn’t care. Maybe trouble was what I needed to make my life a little more interesting.
    And then suddenly she pulled back from me and checked her watch. “Damn. Gotta go,” she said. “Big Sunday dinner with my folks. And I’m starving.” She kissed me one more time on the lips and then left.
    I sat there for a few minutes, suddenly not feeling all that good. I touched the scratch on my nose and remembered the tree. Then I found myself looking up into the branches of the trees around me, and I watched the patterns of the sunlight coming through the leaves.
    Trees reminded me of my grandfather, my father’s father, who had died when I was twelve. The trees had killed him.
    Well, maybe it wasn’t the trees’ fault, but at the moment it seemed that way. I missed him, even now.
    He had insisted I not call him Granddad or Grandpop or anything like that. His name was Henry and he liked to be called Hank. “Like Hank Williams or Hank Snow or Hank Aaron,” he’d say, although none of those names meant much to me.
    My father was always busy and never did a lot of father-son things with me. He worked for an insurance company for a long time, and he’d work weekends if he had to. Right up to the time he was fired and had to look for a new career. Hank wasn’t like that. Hank would show up on a Saturday with thetop down on his Mustang convertible. He’d drive me anywhere I wanted to go. During my skateboarding phase, he would even take me to the skateboard park and join me. The kids all laughed at him when he fell, but he didn’t care.
    Can you picture some kid’s grandfather on a half-pipe? That was Hank. “Sean, you only get to live once,” he’d say. “And you can’t just sit on your ass and watch the world go by.”
    He made a living by building homemade ultralight aircraft. He’d make one at a time and then sell it. I don’t think he made a ton of money but he liked what he did. I was never allowed to fly with him in his noisy, two-person, totally-open-cockpit planes. Not even once. He and my father argued about that a hundred times. And my mother told Hank that if he didn’t stop asking about it, he wouldn’t be allowed to hang out with me at all.
    And so I think Hank must have really liked me as a grandson because he stopped asking. Instead of flying, we hiked. And sometimes we swam in a deep abandonedquarry where every sound echoed off the cliff walls. And it was there, with the safety of deep water beneath us, that he tried to teach me to rock climb—barefooted in a bathing suit, using nothing but fingers and feet to climb a sheer rock wall.
    I never got very high. I fell a few times and it felt like I was going to die. Hank would climb way up to a ledge and then do a cannonball into the water. He’d surface with a big grin on his face. My parents never found out about the quarry or the rock climbing. They just thought we were swimming in the public pool. It was a secret I kept even after Hank was gone. And it was a secret Hank took to his grave.
    The first ultralight crash didn’t kill him. The engine conked out, and he said he was pretty sure he could glide in to safety but the wind suddenly switched. “And the ground came up and grabbed me,” he said, always enjoying the reports of his own near- death disasters.
    The second crash involved a neighbor’s shed. “The man just can’t die,” he’d said,having walked away from that one with no