Watcher at the Crossing by Ash Fitzsimmons EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Ash Fitzsimmons
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Fantasy Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
For me, Uncle Malachi died at seven-fourteen a.m. on a Tuesday, as I
was halfway through my cornflakes. The coroner pegged him as having
expired quite a few hours earlier—exactly how this estimate was reached, I
didn’t want to know—but seven-fourteen was when Chief Brundage called
to deliver the bad news. A sophomore soccer player conditioning for fall
tryouts had gone for a cross-country run and stumbled across the body, by
then a twisted lump lying facedown in the brown detritus of last year’s
leaves.
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That would teach him to add variety to his workouts.
I didn’t learn about the traumatized tenth grader until Wednesday,
when I saw the half-column story in the midweek Gazette. Tuesday passed
in a haze of visits to institutional rooms that smelled of cheap antiseptic—
the police station, the rural clinic, the tri-county morgue. Finally, I found
myself home on the couch with a bottle of chardonnay and Mia, who kept
the wine flowing until it finally hit me that I was now well and truly alone
in the world and broke into sloppy drunk sobs. She peeled me up on
Wednesday morning, made double-strength coffee, and ordered me into the
shower so that I could face the world with a modicum of presentability.
“Eat, Suze,” she directed, plopping a plate of cheesy scrambled eggs and
toast in front of me, and though I had little appetite, I knew Mia well
enough not to argue.
We were old pros at that macabre dance by then, Mia and me. We’d
been roommates during senior year of college, when Uncle Malachi called
two weeks after Christmas to give me the bad news about Dad. As I’d
floundered in my grief, she’d forced me to bathe and eat cheap pizza and
stare at something besides the off-white walls of our suite. It was Mia
who’d kept her arm around me during the funeral, and it took Mia and
Uncle Malachi working together to coax me out of my too-quiet house and
back to school to finish the semester. That spring, I’d held Mia’s hand while
she called her mother and confessed that the reason she’d never brought a
nice boy around was that she much preferred nice girls, and that had been
almost a death of sorts, too, considering the subsequent silence from home.
We’d walked at graduation with only each other to cheer us on—Uncle
Malachi never left Cole’s Crossing, and Ms. Randolph still wasn’t speaking
to Mia—but we’d done it together. And then Mia had flown away to New
York for an internship with an architectural magazine, and I’d returned to
the Crossing to pick up the pieces of my father’s life and reassemble them
into something I could own.
But once again, it was Mia and me—her smarting from a bad breakup
and an ignominious, unemployed end to her internship, me living alone in
my childhood house, still sleeping in my old bedroom instead of in Dad’s
wide brass bed. When Uncle Malachi died, Mia knew the steps of our
depressing tango.
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