The Blue Mountain Review Issue 14

The thing that Wade came to understand was that he was always less important to his mother than her next drink. He questioned why he’d decided to come home. He stopped talking to Tom, following him down the stairs silently.

In the kitchen, Lisa had filled three coffee mugs. “This house had five or six owners in just a few years, and two divorces. The neighbors called it the troubled house. Tom and I bought it after the young man who lived here died in a car wreck.”

It certainly was troubled when we lived here, Wade thought, and was glad when Lisa interrupted his thoughts by handing him a book, an old paperback with cardboard covers.

Tom told Wade, “I found it between joists in the crawl space off your old bedroom.”

Wade turned its fragile pages. “101 Favorite Poems. It’s a wonderful find. I think I found it in a bookcase downstairs when I was still in grade school.”

Lisa topped off the mugs. “Read it and see if it brings back any memories.”

Wade thought he might have remembered his father reading “Jest ‘Fore Christmas” by Eugene Field aloud to him and his sister. Could it have been from this book? Then Wade spotted his carefullyinscribed initials, WM, one letter the upside-down of the other, on the flyleaf. He had appropriated it from the bookcase. He kept reading.

Lisa asked, “Are these the kinds of poems you write?”

“Sometimes. But with less rhyming. Here, listen to the way Kipling starts ‘If.’ “If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too” Lisa smiled warmly. “This book should be yours.”

Wade shook his head. “No, I couldn’t take it from you. But here’s the part everybody remembers, the last stanza: ‘If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!’”

Wade remembered wishing his father had been the kind of man who would talk to him like that. But now a father himself, he thought perhaps children ask too much of their parents. In a way, the birth of his daughter had allowed him to forgive his own parents. He looked at his hosts. “Maybe I should work on rhyming mine more—there’s power in those rhymes.”

“It’s yours again.” Lisa looked at Tom, who nodded in agreement.

Wade started to refuse the book, but remembered the old adage that to accept a gift is to give a gift.

The next step came to him. Step Five: Accept Life’s Gifts, and he said, simply, “thank you."

Issue 14 | Blue Mountain Review | 59