The Book Read Free

slept.
    The striped bamboo door to his apartment closed with significance. Holden lowered his eyes as he dropped his duffle bag to the floorboards, rolled his shoulders and cracked the top of his spine with a long, exhaled breath. He was home and it was time for the ritual to begin. Leave work at the door, take off the boots and break the seal of a richly deserved, locally brewed beer. Jiggety Jig. Yes, his family life was non-existent. But Holden was content with his small story. Most days he strolled directly to his easy chair and picked up where he left off on the train. On special days, he went back to his father’s copy of The Book that sat by the window and returned to his favorite story. Today, there was a kink. The phone on the wall was blinking.
    Sweaty beer in hand, he closed the fridge and approached the answering machine, already knowing what he was about to hear and already regretting his actions of the past forty minutes. The two messages were from, or about, his two favorite people in the world. Shane and Jane.
    Shane was his best friend. In fact, they had the All-American relationship. They grew up in the same neighborhood, dated the same girls, fought over the same girls and spent every moment they could together to this day. Like Holden, Shane worked for General Fire Protection. His message was typical and to the point.
    “Meet me at The Library, man. Maybe we can reignite what happened last month with the librarian,” Shane’s charred, confident voice chuckled before he continued. “I know it’s raining, but don’t spend the weekend at home, bro. I’m buying and the game starts at six. Don’t be late.”
    He clicked to the next message and looked at his watch, hoping the call would be from Jane. It wasn’t. Jane was Holden’s eleven-year-old daughter. Their relationship could be summed up in two conflicting words: simple and complicated. They barely saw one another. On the off chance that Holden pulled himself from his nothingness to see her, it was under the discretion of his militant ex-wife, Eve. Jane loved her father, but life kept them separate. That, and Holden’s unwavering forgetfulness.
    Eve’s message was blunt.
    “How many times is this going to happen, Hold? You were supposed to pick up Jane an hour ago. What a surprise!” Her stringent, acid-laced tone curdled in his ears. He cracked his beer open. “Why don’t you just enjoy that drink I’m sure you’re holding and I’ll make something up again. I can’t watch her sit by the phone waiting for your call. So don’t call.”
    He took a swig from his beer and laughed. Despite being disappointed in himself for abandoning his daughter again, this was the first time in years that Eve hadn’t finished a conversation by calling him ‘predictably unreliable’ or mentioning that pipe fitters shouldn’t have pipe dreams they couldn’t finish. Maybe that wasn’t a good thing , Holden thought, as he reached for the picture frame on the shelf beside the phone. The digital frame held thirty pictures from Jane’s ninth birthday. Eve looked miserable in every over-exposed shot. What made Holden put it down and reach for his beer was that he realized these were the only photos of Jane in the whole house and they were two years old. He felt so suddenly guilty. What kind of a father didn’t have a recent picture of his kid?
    In a glance, Holden’s reflection in the frame spoke a thousand words. The brown fuzz of his hair was coarse and his long, ragged, unshaven face was four days past socially acceptable. His notched nose, broken by a young Shane during one of their many childish arguments, carried a slight twist that most women found markedly attractive. Eve had been one of those, long ago. Holden stared into his dull brown eyes. Once young and gleaming with lightness and hope, they now drooped from his face, empty. He was thirty-three going on fifty and felt more lost than ever.
    Holden eyed the phone’s dusty receiver and debated