Read Providence for Free Online Page B

knowing how this would come off.
    “You’re making way too much of this, Jack. Just scribe us a book. Two hundred pages; that’s just two pages a day,” Arthur said, sounding like a third-rate used-car salesman shining up the deal. He didn’t seem to care what I gave him. He just needed my life printed, packaged, and shrink-wrapped in quickie-mart time.
    After our conversation I was agitated. Each event in this saga seemed to take more control out of my hands. I went back into the kitchen to refill my coffee mug and felt like a man adrift in an ocean of sharks. Arthur had no idea what was going on inside the mind of his million-dollar author. He didn’t have the first clue about the anxiety prickling under my skin.
    My life was beginning to implode. For the next twelve weeks, I’d wade into mysterious waters and submerge into the wreckage of a shipwrecked past. And I’d stay there, grappling with emotions that, like shark fins, were only now beginning to surface.

~ F IVE ~
    Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama.
    —The Beach Boys
    “Kokomo”
    It was eleven thirty when I emerged from my office Tuesday night. The inside of the house had taken on the quietness of an empty church. Outside I could hear the muted sounds of fireworks popping in the night sky, signaling that Christmas break was close at hand. It was a welcome nuisance.
    I walked the long hallway downstairs, stretching every aching muscle, breaking my body free from the mad hours spent working in the same seated position.
    Ten mad hours of writing. I’d done this before, lived it while working on my last three books. But that writing was part-time, absent the pressure of a twelve-week deadline.
    Being single all these years, I’d gotten used to long stretches of flying solo. Somewhere in my thirties, I’d finally recognized that my singleness wasn’t just a phase I’d outgrow. I’d had dreams once of being married. I certainly never imagined living alone year after year. Yet here I was, a forty-year-old man who’d learned to take the love he had for one woman and break it into a thousand pieces to give away to the poor.
    I switched on the stereo with the remote and pushed the shuffle button. A moment later Chris Eaton was singing “Wonderful World.”
    I have shouldered the blame for too long, I have hidden my light under a cloud…
    Two of Mrs. Hernandez’s Christmas burritos wrapped in green cellophane caught my eye on the top shelf of the fridge. I stuck them in the microwave and grabbed a cold can of Coke.
    It was snowing again, the graceful snow of angels. The hypnotically slow rhythm of white flakes falling through the black sky. I remembered the weatherman saying something about accumulation. Had it been today or the day before? I carried my plate to the living-room sofa. My eyelids grew heavy, and I was too tired to eat. Another song came on. A Taylor Dayne love song from the eighties.
Love will lead you back
Someday I just know that
Love will lead you back to my arms
It won’t be long
One of these days
Our love will lead you back
    I fell asleep with the lights on, drifting off and wondering what it would feel like being brought back by love. Thoughts and words melted together beneath the firm press of unconsciousness. “The Lord did it,” I whispered. “Led me back by love.”

    Early the next morning, I dressed in two layers of sweats and jogged through five inches of fresh snowfall. Covered in the fresh powder, the Providence campus looked brand new, untouched by traffic and footprints.
    Twenty minutes later I pulled open the heavy glass door of Liberty Deli, a greasy spoon a block off South Campus. It was one of the first restaurants Mitch and I had claimed as our own when we’d gotten to Providence. The place is run by three Middle Eastern brothers named Quaddi, and it’s loved in Providence for its unique … character. Orange-cushioned booths, a Formica counter with red swivel chairs, and cartoonlike paintings of food depicted