We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman (read aloud txt) 📕

were quiet, I just knew.” She pulls down the sheet and the birdsong falls silent. “I just knew.”

I can still hear the sound of her screams when she found him that morning. I’d known straightaway too: the inevitable had finally happened.

And I was relieved. The end had finally come.

But it wasn’t the end. Mom kept screaming. At the hospital where they pronounced him dead. At the morgue where they took his body for an autopsy. At the memorial service hardly anyone attended. Every morning she woke wailing, as if his death was happening to her over and over again.

“She needs time,” Ira told me. “She’ll get better in time.” But she didn’t. And every day that she didn’t, Ira got worse. He’d kept it pretty together through Sandy’s sickness, and even his death, but when Mom started to unravel, so did he.

A new dread descended over me, thick as the December skies. If this carried on, I was going to lose all of them. Not just Sandy, who was already gone. Not just Mom, who was halfway gone. But Ira too.

I began to wish Mom would just leave, the way I’d wished Sandy would just die.

And then she did.

And nothing got better.

Ira may be the Giving Tree, but the boy with the ax who chops him down, branch by branch—that’s me.

I fall asleep in my clothes without eating and wake the next morning to the sounds of the birds chirping away. I blink. The clock reads 10:34. Ramón is staring at me, his eyes pinning.

“You know the truth, don’t you, little buddy?” I ask him.

His eyes grow larger, smaller, larger, smaller.

I shuffle into the kitchen. Mom is staring at the refrigerator. “It’s Thanksgiving,” she says, pulling open the empty drawers. “I sort of forgot it was happening and now all I have is chicken soup and hot dogs. I suppose we could go to the market and see if there are any turkeys left.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m not feeling very thankful.”

She turns to me. “Funnily enough, today I am.”

My stomach lets out a gurgle. I haven’t eaten since the Circle K in Phoenix. “Wouldn’t mind some chicken soup.”

Mom pulls out a Tupperware container and ladles some into a bowl, popping it in the microwave. As it heats, the smell fills up the kitchen, but this time it doesn’t transport me anywhere. I stay here. The microwave dings. She pulls out the bowl and plops it in front of me. “Eat up and have a shower. I borrowed some of the owner’s clothes for you because I couldn’t find any suitcase in the car.”

I swirl my spoon into the soup, chunky with carrots and onions and hunks of white meat, but no noodles. Ira is a firm believer that the only starch that should adorn chicken soup is a matzo ball.

“By the way, what’s my porch swing doing in the car?”

I take my first bite. It is salty and fatty and warm and it goes straight into my bloodstream. Immediately, I feel a bit better.

“That’s a long story.”

“Finish your soup. We’ll take the dogs out for a walk and you can tell it to me.”

The house is in the foothills of the Piños Altos, and we set up a steep, rocky trail. As we walk in the brisk, clear air, I let the story unspool backward, starting with the porch swing in the car, to the record selling, to the renovation, to the building of the ramp, to the night I met Chad and went and sold the store to Penny Macklemore.

Mom’s face stays neutral as I talk. Clearly, this is old news.

“Ira told you?”

“You sold the store out from under him. You think he wouldn’t tell me that?”

A fresh fist of guilt socks me in the gut. “I figured he might. The next time you called.”

Mom gives me a look. “Your father and I talk almost every day.”

“You call once a week.”

This time, Mom rolls her eyes. “I call you once a week, my reticent son. But I speak to Ira frequently. He calls me when he’s on his walks.”

“He does? I thought he was smoking pot.”

“Ira?” She laughs. “He’s too paranoid for that.”

“So if you talk to Ira every day, do you know about . . . ?”

“Bev? Of course.”

“And you’re okay with it?”

Mom unleashes the dogs. Mindy bounds up the hill, but Terrence stays by our side until Mom pulls out a bright yellow rubber ball. “I want your father to be happy,” Mom says as Terrence trots off after the ball. “He wants me to be happy. And we both want you to be happy. But when you’ve been through what we have, you start to understand that happy doesn’t always look like it used to. Family doesn’t always look like it used to. But it’s still family.”

“That’s what Ira says.”

We reach the top of the hill. Off to the side is a rocky promontory, a series of boulders jutting out from the craggy hillside, as if in defiance of gravity. Mom whistles and the dogs come running. She leashes them and ties them to a pine tree, which is gnarled but strong, reminding me of Ike. She plops down at the edge of a flat rock, her legs dangling into the canyon.

“Why didn’t you say something? Tell anyone?” she asks as I sit down next to her.

“I don’t know,” I admit, throwing a rock into the ravine. “I meant to. But then things just sort of got out of control. I sold to Penny and the Lumberjacks came and I tried to get out of it, I tried to tell the truth, but I just kept digging myself deeper. And every day I’d wake up and think: ‘Today is the day I’ll fix it.’ But then the day passed and I couldn’t do it.”

“You know who you sound like?”

“Ira,” I reply.

“No, Sandy.”

“Why do people keep saying that? I’m nothing like Sandy!”

“Aren’t you?”

“No! I like books, not music. I look like Ira, not you.