Nothing as Whole as a Broken Heart by Barry Rachin (free books to read .TXT) 📕

he’s got this crush on Doris' mom.”
Grace groaned inwardly. She had met Rita Fuller, a pretty woman on the front side of forty with dirty blond hair that cascaded down her back in ringlets, once or twice at PTO meetings. Grace was trying to picture a glassy-eyed Jerome Spellman engaged in romantic repartee with a woman old enough to be his mother. “He’s got mental problems,” she stated the obvious.
“Last Saturday, Jerome stopped by the diner and took a seat at the far counter where Mrs. Fuller was working. He eats his food, then, like some under-aged Don Juan, plunks a twenty dollar bill down next to his plate and tells the woman to keep the change.” “A breakfast special,” Angie added, “costs less than five dollars, and that includes coffee with a free refill.”
“So what’d Mrs. Fuller do?”
“She handed Doris three five-dollar bills and asked her to return the money to the parents.”
Grace felt a tightness in her chest. “And?”
Angie was staring at the greasy cooking pan. The fire had died down to a pile of glowing embers that emitted a comforting, smokeless glow. “The way Mrs. Spellman apologized, you might have thought Jerome committed the crime of the century. She promised they’d make sure he only had enough cash to cover the cost of the meal and a small tip if he went for breakfast in the future.”
So much for leaving the work-a-day world behind. Grace let out a deep sigh. “We might as well camp here for the night,” she announced. “I’ll put some coffee on before we unpack.”
Angie took the blackened pan down to the stream, rinsed the last few grains of rice away and filled their canteens with fresh water. When she returned to the campsite an elderly man with a white beard and rickety legs was sitting on a stump. “Mr. Anderson,” Angie’s mother announced, “will be joining us for coffee.”
The old man smiled displaying an expanse of pink gums but not very much in the way of teeth. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew an ivory flower surrounded by red berries. “For the girl.”
“Dogwood?” Grace said. “They seldom flourish this far east.”
The old man nodded. “Some people call them bunchberry, but it’s just a different name for the same plant.” Mr. Anderson wore a tan-colored hearing aid and his left hand trembled when he rested it in his lap; it was unclear if he suffered from a chronic illness or was just tired. Despite the warm weather, he wore a long sleeve flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists. Grace fixed the coffee and passed around sugar cookies.


The old man’s wife had passed away the previous spring. The year before she died, they hiked the Appalachian Trail as far down as Hump Mountain along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, crossing through rugged hill country where several inches of snow had fallen the previous day. “Toes got frostbitten, but it still turned out okay.” Mr. Anderson took a sip of coffee and sloshed the dark liquid in the warm, tin cup. “Met some real decent folk, along the trail.”
He threw the last of his coffee into the fire sending up a fitful tongue of orange sparks. The more he lingered the more melancholy the old man seemed. As the threesome rested by the campfire, Grace no longer noticed the huge gaps between the teeth that were and the teeth that might have been,. The songbirds had bedded down for the night, their incessant trilling upstaged by the rhythmic clatter of crickets and bullfrogs. “Tell you a funny story before I go,” Mr. Anderson said. He rested his good hand over the other and the trembling momentarily subsided.
“A boy wakes up one morning to find his faithful dog missing. He fashions a sign on a piece of cardboard. The sign reads: Lost Dog. Walks with limp - got run over, sideswiped by tractor-trailer last spring; gimpy hind leg; cataracts both eyes, left ear chewed off in mishap with homicidal pit bull.” The old man paused for dramatic effect. “ Answers to the name Lucky.”
Answers to the name Lucky.
The two women waved as the old man disappeared down the trail into the darkness. Grace understood perfectly well that most people, regardless of outward appearances, were chewed up and run over by the vagaries of life. You could have a hearty laugh while sitting at a campfire; the trick was to maintain one’s composure after leaving the solitude of the Maine woods and rejoining the money-grubbing rat race. “That’s our destination tomorrow,” Grace pointed at a bright star above a ridge of spruce. “Polaris, the North Star. It hangs like a jewel on the end of the Little Dipper and points the way to Mount Katahdin.”
“I’m going to bed,” Grace said. She wondered if Mr. Anderson’s left hand had stopped trembling. And did he yearn for his soul mate when he lay in his sleeping bag? Did he dream of their wintry exploits on Hump Mountain? He wouldn’t have to worry about frostbite tonight.
Around midnight, Angie heard her mother stir. Grace rolled out of the sleeping bag and went outside. “What’s the matter?” Angie asked when she returned.
“Had to pee.” Grace crawled back into the sleeping bag and lay still.
“I hope Mr. Anderson’s all right,” Angie whispered. “I mean, what if something happened to him out her in the middle of the woods?”
Somewhere deep in the hills an owl let looses with a prolonged, throaty hoot resonant as a foghorn. The crickets and frogs were unimpressed. Mr. Anderson was probably fast asleep, dreaming about his lost youth and all the wonderful adventures that still awaited him on the A.T.. Grace reached out and brushed her daughter's cheek with her fingertips. "Say a prayer, then."
"Yes, I'll do that."
Perhaps you could remember Jerome Spellman in your prayers, too." The girl grunted sleepily and rolled over in her sleeping bag. A few minutes later, Grace could hear her daughter’s steady breathing.
Say a prayer… Jerome Spellman was a hopeless case. According to Dr. Rosen, drugs were useless, therapy utterly futile. A universe full of prayer and good intentions wouldn't make a bit of difference against a relentless, inexorable disease. Where Jerome Spellman was concerned, God had officially gone AWOL.


In the morning Angie woke to find her mother’s sleeping bag empty. Grace returned before the girl had wrestled her hiking boots on. “Come with me!” She dragged Angie along the trail past the stream, then down a narrower footpath. At the bottom of a stony trail, the trees fell away to reveal a sandy pond rimmed with hawthorn and Canadian yew. “A blizzard of rainbow trout! Look for yourself.”
Angie stood with her boots nipping the water and watched as a steady procession of speckled fish cruised in and out of the shallows. “There’s enough protein to feed an army.”
“Or hungry Indian tribe,” her mother interjected. Grace began pulling her clothes off, flinging her blouse, bra and shorts in a pile.
Angie’ face flamed brighter than a sugar maple in late October. “Are you nuts?”
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning. No one’s probably been by this pond in weeks. Most of the hikers won’t be back on the trail for another hour or two.” Her mother waded into the water up to her knees and, bending low, began slapping water on her arms and breasts. Grace’s body was still strong and athletic, prettier than most women’s her age.
If anyone had suggested a mere five minutes ago that Angie would find herself skinny-dipping with her mother in the boondocks of Maine, she would have rolled her eyes and deemed them certifiably insane. The young girl pulled her T-shirt up over her head in one smooth motion. “How’s the water?”
“Warm as a bathtub.” Her mother was floating on her back toward the middle of the pond. Angie could feel a scaly body brush against her calf as she waded up to her hips.


They reached the base of Mount Katahdin in the early afternoon, but the weather turned gray and heavy rain pummeled the trail into a muddy mess. “This certainly isn’t fun,” Angie grumbled. A group of hikers returning from the summit looked beleaguered, worn out and miserable. Her mother spoke with one of the climbers. “It’s tough going. There’s a raw wind and, without sun, the temperature is good twenty degrees colder.”
They went and huddled under a lean-to with a dozen other campers. Half an hour later the rain was still pelting the ground relentlessly. “We’ll climb tomorrow,” her mother announced. “I’ll go pitch the tent and we’ll make do until this awful weather breaks.”
“Everything soaked. There's no a decent place to put a tent.”
“We’re all in the same boat.” Grace gestured at the rest of the hikers. “You’ll just have to make do.” She left Angie crouched under the lean-to and went off to see about the tent.
The young girl began to cry but nobody noticed. They didn’t notice because all the hikers were soaked to the bone and Angie's tears just looked like so much extra precipitation. A half-hour later, Grace returned. She managed to pitch the tent beneath a large tree. The ground was covered with a bed of pine needles, which held up reasonably well under the rain. Angie crawled into the tent and unwrapped her sleeping bag. Then she slithered in, zipped it up around her neck and, with the rain mercilessly slashing the canvas at a forty-five degree angle, went to sleep.
No matter that it was two in the afternoon, that she hadn’t bothered to change out of her damp clothes or eaten anything since breakfast. Angie dozed and when she woke, she slept again. She snoozed through eleven straight hours of rain; when the girl woke, the sun was shining, she felt refreshed and sublimely happy. Her mother was already cooking up a pan of fried salami. She handed Angie a cup of coffee. They ate quickly without much conversation, and were back on the trail within an hour.
“Tuckahoe,” Grace indicated a plant growing in the cleft of a lichen-stained rock. “Also known as Indian bread. The roots are quite tasty or at least some Native Americans think so.”
They reached the summit of Mount Katahdin by early afternoon and lingered for an hour with a dozen other hikers. On the way down they recognized Mr. Anderson. The grizzled veteran gave them a toothless, thin-lipped smile as he plodded past. He wore a knapsack without a frame and a knobby walking stick. “Traveling light in his twilight years,” Grace observed.
“How old do you think he is?”
“Hard to say. Eighty give or take a decade.” Angie couldn’t be sure if her mother was pulling her leg. What would make an old man in poor health want to be out in the wilderness alone and unprotected? The same torrential downpour that trapped them for most of the previous day had menaced him, too. But the adaptable and resilient old man had made it through with his sunny disposition intact. Mr. Anderson's life was a richly variegated tapestry of misadventures and blithe perambulations. At this late juncture, when the dross sifted free of precious moments, it was a life well lived.
Grace suggested that they head south until the setting sun got caught up on the treetops before pitching camp. They had been moving slowly down a rutted path when Angie grabbed her mother’s arm and brought her up short. A hundred feet away in a secluded pond stood a full-grown moose. The large, palmate antlers showed that it was a male. He dipped his head beneath the water and, when the broad muzzle reappeared, it was full of soggy vegetation ripped from the muddy water. They stood and