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

me, as if he’s reading over my shoulder the way Ira sometimes does. By the time I finish, I know that I will not stay here with Mom. I will go back and face up to the fear and the grief, that which I’ve caused and that which I’ve been the victim of.

“Do you want me to drive up with you?” Mom asks when I tell her before bed that I’ll be leaving in the morning.

I shake my head. She’s stopped running away. Let her stay, with her birds. I’ll come back another time. Figure out a way to be family.

She tucks the covers around me. “Want me to sing to you?” She’s half joking, unsure.

But I do. “Please.”

She sits down on the edge of the bed. When she begins, the years fall away, as she sings us all the way back to that day that started us all.

Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.

My Brother

Mom insists I stop somewhere along the drive, so arrangements are made for me to spend the night at a motel in Boise. When I pull up, the clerk tells me the room has already been checked in by the other party.

“What other party?” I ask, even though I know the answer to that even before I see my father through the window, reading a book by lamplight.

I have so many questions. What is he doing here? How did he get here? Does he forgive me? What about Chad and Ike and the Lumberjacks? But instead I speak in the language that’s always come most naturally to us. “What are you reading?”

“Funny you should ask.” He holds up his book. Something by Jamaica Kincaid. It’s called My Brother. “It’s a memoir,” Ira explains. “Kincaid processing the grief after her brother died of AIDS.” He shakes his head. “Not processing. That’s the wrong word. Processing makes it sound like you digest your grief. It reminds me of the mourner’s kaddish, somehow. Like she’s singing her grief, because words are not sufficient. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.”

Mom, singing me to sleep. Hannah, singing to tell a story. Bev, singing away her panic attacks. “Actually, it kind of does.”

“I thought it might be of interest to you.” He pauses. “But only if you want.” He looks pained. “Are you really not reading anymore?”

“I haven’t really been able to read since Sandy died.”

“And all the books I assigned you . . . ?”

“I’ve been faking. About that. And a lot of stuff.” I take a deep breath, forcing myself to keep going. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about selling the store. I sort of did it in a panic, after I saw your credit cards, but the truth is, I just wanted out.”

“Out of what, exactly?” Ira asks.

“The store.”

“Hmm.” Ira strokes his beard. “See, the thing that perplexes me is, if you wanted out of the store, you could’ve sold it months ago. And after you did sell it, you went to a lot of trouble to try to get it back.” Ira shakes his head. “I might be bad at running a business, but you’re terrible at shuttering one. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t quite buy this.”

Hannah called me an unreliable narrator. And maybe I am. The thing with unreliable narrators is that sometimes even they don’t know why they do what they do.

“I ask again: What is it you want out of?” Ira asks, leading me to an answer he already knows.

I think of Chad, falling off the cliff, those three seconds when he was sure he was going to die. It’s like I’ve been suspended in those three seconds ever since Sandy got sick.

“I want out of inevitability,” I tell Ira.

“Inevitability?” Ira asks.

“Knowing that something bad is going to happen, whether you want it to or not, to the point that you just want it to happen so you can stop dreading it.”

“You mean like your brother dying?”

I swallow the lump in my throat and nod. “And Mom leaving. I knew that was coming, and I just wanted it to be over. Same with the store.”

“And you think you have the power to make people live or die? To impact consumer trends?” Ira chuckles. “I didn’t realize I’d fathered a god.”

When he says it like that, it does sound kind of ridiculous.

Ira continues. “You should also know something: I told Annie to leave after Sandy died.”

“You did?”

Ira nods. “She was flailing, caught in this loop of grief. I was afraid what would become of you if she stayed.”

“I wanted her to leave because I was afraid what would happen to you if she stayed.”

Ira strokes his beard and smiles sadly: “How very ‘Gift of the Magi.’”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s that O. Henry story where the husband sells his pocket watch to buy his wife combs for her hair, and she sells her hair to buy him a chain for his pocket watch.” He pauses. “They both try to do something for the other but they kind of lovingly blow it. Like us.”

“Like us,” I repeat. “Are the answers to all life’s questions in books?”

“Of course,” he says. “That’s what makes them miracles.”

The next morning, I wake to a call from Penny Macklemore. It’s Sunday at eight thirty, but tomorrow is D-Day. December 1. “Just reminding you we have an appointment at my office at ten o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

I wake Ira, an idea forming. “Did some guy come for the records?” I ask him.

“Huh?” he asks. Bleary-eyed.

“I sold Sandy’s records. To a guy named Daryl. He was supposed to drop off a check for Chad and get the records. Did he come?”

“Oh, that fellow. He came.” Ira yawns. “I sent him away.”

“Why? He was gonna pay eight grand for the records. I was going to pay back Chad and the guys. I need to make amends.”

“That you do, but the records are worth at least five times that.”

“How