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

was November, and Bluebird Books was up and running. The ring was solidly on the finger.

Ira never loved the dark, gray winters, but after the asteroid, when Yin lost its Yang, when Thanatos went solo, they became unendurable. He’s always cold now, even in summer. The wet gets into his bones. He complains of aching joints, suffers a constant hoarse cough. He sleeps in mittens and thick wool socks. And every night he soaks his feet in the bathtub, trying to get rid of the chill.

This is where I find him tonight, huddled on the ledge of the tub, wrapped in his old Pendleton blanket. When we get out of here, I will take us somewhere warm, where the sun hangs stubbornly in the sky no matter what the calendar dictates. I will reverse-Rules Ira. Trick him into moving somewhere where he will be warm, and if not happy, a little bit less sad.

“Ira, I need to tell you something,” I say right as the landline starts to ring.

“Can you get that?” Ira calls. “It might be your mother.”

Of course it’s Mom. Who else calls on the landline anymore?

I decided not tell Ira what I was going to do before it was done. I wanted it to be too late to turn back. Now it is. And I have to tell him. “I need to speak to you. Now.”

“Can you get the phone first?” We disconnected the answering machine, so the phone continues to ring. She knows we’re home.

“It’s important.”

“Your mother is important.” He says this with all sincerity, no bitterness. He believes we’re still a family. Just a different kind of family.

“Fine,” I grouse. I grab the extension from the kitchen, pick up with a sigh. “Hey, Mom.”

“Aaron, my love . . .”

I’ve read stories about how grief or trauma changes people overnight. Black hair goes gray. Smooth skin goes wrinkled. With Mom, it was her voice. Always strong and clear, if unapologetically off-key when she sang, which was often. The woman on the other end of the line, however, sounds like an old lady, even though Mom’s not yet fifty.

I hear dogs barking in the background. The dogs are new. Which means she’s moved again.

“Where are you now?”

“Silver City, New Mexico, taking care of two dogs, five parakeets, and a pair of cats. The cats are feral, so I just leave them food.”

That’s what she does now, bounces from place to place, pet-sitting. The last time I talked to her, she was minding an epaulette shark in a giant three-hundred-gallon home aquarium in Orlando, Florida.

“How are you feeling, my love?” she asks.

Penny had a fancy fountain pen for me to sign with, but I couldn’t quite seem to get the angle right and there’s a big ink spot on my thumb. I wipe it on my jeans, but it only smears. How I’m feeling is like Lady Macbeth.

“Good, good.”

“And how are things in the store?”

“Same as always,” I say, and though this is nearly always true—Ira’s and my routine is unflaggingly, well, routine—tonight it’s a blatant fiction.

There’s an awkward pause. In the background, I can hear the birdsong.

“What are you reading these days?” Mom asks. In our family, this question is small talk, along the lines of How’s the weather?

“Ira’s reading West Indian authors and he has me on the Central Europeans.”

“The writers with only consonants in their names?”

“Those are the ones. What’s Silver City like?” I hear the glug of the tub draining, meaning Ira is almost done and I can get off the phone.

“The locals call it Silver. It’s nice. A lot of sunshine.”

Ira pads into the room, his feet bare, his toes long and fingerlike, white with black hair. He gives me a kiss, his untamed beard tickling my neck. I hand him the phone without saying goodbye.

Her voice fills the air. She’s still talking to me when Ira lifts the phone to his ear. “Hi, Annie. It’s me now.”

“When you get off, I need to speak to you,” I tell Ira.

He nods. “Did you lock up downstairs?”

“Everything’s taken care of.”

He heads toward his bedroom, cradling the handset, tracking wet footprints on the wood. Before he goes into his room, he turns back to me and says, “Thanks for being you.”

This is what he always says to me. And normally I reply, courtesy of Oscar Wilde, “Everyone else was taken.” It’s our longstanding schtick, but tonight, knowing what I just did, I can’t bear to say it.

The Giving Tree

Ira winds up staying on the phone with Mom late into the night, so I don’t have a chance to talk to him. The next morning, when he comes down to open the store, he’s wrecked, his beard seems grayer, his posture more stooped, his thin frame even more depleted.

When I see him like this, I can’t help thinking he’s the human incarnation of The Giving Tree, not just because he’s tall and lanky but because everyone keeps taking chunks out of him. For the life of me I never understood why we housed that book in the children’s section. It belongs in self-help, along with all the other books about dysfunctional relationships. Or maybe in horror.

The steady soaking rain kept up all night, and this morning a new leak has sprung in the ceiling. I fetch another saucepan to catch the runoff, but as I go hunting for a tarp to cover the books, Ira trips over the pan, sending it flying into his shin. “Goddammit!” he yelps, hopping on one foot.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Why are you sorry? You don’t control the rain, do you?”

“If only,” I reply. “Can I get you some tea?”

“I’ll get it myself.” But on the way to the kettle, he bangs into the pile of books that are still on the floor after the shelf collapsed. He yelps again. When he finally gets settled into his chair, he spills the tea all over his lap. “I seem to have woken up on the wrong