Thank You for All Things Read Free Page A

jackets. He teaches poetry and poetics—the analysis of the art of poetry, if your IQ score happens to be even lower than mine—at the university. He fishes, hikes, grows violets, and writes poetry, of course.
    Every time Peter came over, he’d stop at Mom’s desk, give a kiss to the top of her head, or her lips, depending on which she presented to him, then walk over to our work-table. He’d come to me first, pick up whatever book I was reading, flip back a chapter or two, read me a sentence at random, then ask, “Where?” I’d close my eyes, turning pages in my mind until I found the passage he’d quoted, and answer something like, “Page one fifty-six. Fourth paragraph!” Peter would laugh every time, shaking his head in admiration for my photographic mind, and shout, “Yes! Yes! She does it again!”
    Then, in the exaggerated swagger of a pompous professor, he’d move to Milo’s side of the table, take a haughty, comical stance, lift his finger into the air as he thought, then ask questions such as, “Mr. McGowan, 17.5 raised tothe power of 653?” or, “Mr. McGowan, what day of the week will it be on January twenty-fourth, 2046?” Milo would give him a swift, accurate answer, and Peter’s laughter would fill the whole room like warm sunshine. When the little game was over, Peter would set one Hershey’s Kiss with an almond inside on each of our palms, then grin with the pride of a real dad before heading to the kitchen for tea.
    Peter was going to take us to Vermont next spring and we were going to help tap maple trees and make syrup, a yearly tradition for Peter and his family. We were going to meet his dad, a widower who, at the age of sixty-four, can walk on his hands clear across his yard (so he would probably appreciate a woman with Tina Turner legs), and his niece, who is twelve and has read
Little Women
fifteen times. A week ago, though, he showed up and handed Mom a poem he’d written on a coffee filter. A poem, he said, that would explain why he needed to break things off with her. He didn’t pick up my book or ask Milo a question that day, but after he handed Mom the poem, he hugged me goodbye, squeezed Milo’s shoulder, and left our Hershey’s Kisses on the table next to our computers. I still have that Kiss.
    Mom’s hands trembled as she read the poem while still standing by the door where he’d left her, and when she was finished, she tossed it into the paper shredder. Then she rested her hands on her scarred desk to steady herself and sat down to resume her work. I ran to the window and looked down to watch Peter waggle through the old people and little kids clogging the stoop. “Don’t let him go!” I screamed. “Mom, please! Call him back! Call him back!” But she didn’t. Instead, she asked me if I’d finished my report on archetypes and warned that, if not, I should get busy.
    Later, when Mom disappeared into the kitchen to nukeour frozen dinners, I dug through the paper shredder and tried to find the strips of coffee filter. It would have been impossible to put them back together, so it probably didn’t matter that Mom caught me and scarfed up the scraps and shoved them into the trash. “That’s okay,” I shouted, crossing my arms across my chest. “I know why he broke up with you, anyway. You have an attachment disorder, that’s why. I don’t need his poem to tell me that.”
    “It’s like my intuitive, Sky Dreamer, says,” Oma announces, her voice grabbing my attention and yanking me back to the here and now. “Sometimes we need to go home to find the parts of ourselves we left behind before we can truly become whole.”
    “Your intuitive? What in the hell are you talking about?”
    “Sky Dreamer, my intuitive. I told you about her, Tess. I met her at that psychic convention I went to in California last November. Remember?” Oma pauses to cough. “She told me that each of us—you, me, Lucy, Milo—we all left parts of ourselves back in that town, in that