Free The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood Page A

the bottom rung of the ladder then. Maud-Lucy had stopped off in Kimball in 1905 on her way back from a trip to the Rangeley Lakes to paint the landscape, a trip she’d made to defy her father, who was trying to marry her off to a dullard who sold trees. Her father’s mistake was in educating her beforehand.
    . . .
    There was an upset on the tracks, so the passengers spilled out to find rooms in town for the night, and Maud-Lucy ran into my mother coming out of the
Kimball Times
where she’d just placed an ad for tenants. Their building wasn’t three days finished.
    . . .
    We did. We thought it was God himself running the show. My mother had me by the hand, a little girl with plaited hair and a dress hand-stitched from flour sacks. Maud-Lucy always said I looked bathed in light.
    . . .
    I know, isn’t that grand? That was our beautiful story: love at first sight. She stayed with us that night and couldn’t leave me.
    . . .
    True, there was the tree-selling dullard waiting back home. But you make your stories, and that was ours. It was true enough. In the end, she went home anyway, with a baby in her arms.
    . . .
    Mama and I walked her to the station. Maud-Lucy looked the same as always—no hat, no gloves, an overdone coat from the 1890s. You know, I can still feel the cold if I try hard enough. It was one of those blue and blustery days. Maud-Lucy took her ticket, then opened the blanket to show the baby’s face. I hadn’t seen him since the first day. I didn’t want to kiss him, but Maud-Lucy insisted. He smelled like a ripe peach.
    . . .
    Mama was crying, to be honest. “Is good life for boy,” she said. Then Maud-Lucy stepped onto the car. All I could think of was crows.
    . . .
    You know the way they hop, all black and flapping? Then the train whistle started up. I can still hear it.
    . . .
    Whooo,
it went. Like that:
whooo.
In my head I was shouting over the noise:
Is good life for
girl.
Is good life for
girl,
too.
    . . .
    Well, I watched her go, what else? I was just a baby myself. The train vanished down the tracks, speeding Laurentas to a future filled with science and literature and sizzling conversations that led to a thing being looked up or written down or sent away for. I was the only creature on earth who understood how happy he’d be. Away he went, taking her wit, her zeal, her notorious independence. Her love for me.
    . . .
    . . .
    Sorry. What?
    . . .
    No. She never even came back for her piano.

Chapter 8
    The boy had decided to take no chances. On the sixth Saturday he brought her a list of the most statistically dangerous pursuits, ranging from death by cave diving (
getting lost while; running out of air while; being eaten by sea creature while
) to death by door (
walking into; burning alive while searching for key to; discovering stairs removed from other side of
). There were fifty-two items on the list.
    â€œRead this just in case,” he cautioned. “You don’t want to get all the way to one hundred twenty-two years, one hundred sixty-four days, and then accidentally die because you”—here he reconsulted his list—“cut off your thumb while slicing a bagel.”
    â€œI wouldn’t want to go like that at any age.”
    After they’d perused the List of Death and Dismemberment, he produced an addendum: home exercise routines for the elderly, plus an updated inventory of supercentenarians (the woman from Japan had died, along with a sketchy contender from Guam), plus ten supercentenarian profiles he’d procured from God knows where. She envisioned the boy’s Internet as a magic cube that crackled with news.
    â€œLook here,” Ona said. “The Hartley woman still reads without her glasses.” She squinted through her own glasses, shuffling the sheets. Some of the profilees were half blind or deaf or off their rockers—these