Free The Constant Heart by Craig Nova Page A

Kilmer died and I went to her funeral. It rained, and only five other people were there, strangers, they seemed to me, who had seen the notice in the paper and had nothing else to do. And each year, more farmland went under the knife of the developers; although the houses got bigger, they were built in a more shoddy way. Still, no one built any more houses near those buzzing power lines. Better agricultural land had become too cheap.
    My mother had left Danville with her physical trainer a month after I had left for Berkeley, although it had taken her years of wandering around the country (in upstate New York,
Utah, Arizona, and Washington State after she had ditched the trainer and she had tried her hand as a potter, a weaver, a maker of macramé, and a barista before finally settling into the ashram in Berkeley about the time I left to come back to Danville . . . she said we were trains passing in the night, but, of course, it was only that I had come back to look after my father). She left my father a note on the kitchen table about how she knew she was meant for a unique future. Her lawyer would be in touch.
    My father and I went fishing together when one of us had bad news. Not just the usual disappointment, but something gone seriously or ominously wrong. The kind of thing that makes you think that if fate were a freight train, and an ill-meaning one at that, it had just gone by at a hundred miles an hour and left you standing in the coal-scented and vicious breeze of the near miss. I had heard, for instance, that a good friend of mine had committed suicide, or my father discovered that he had almost been fired in a budgetary cut, but had barely survived. On these occasions, and many others that scared us, my father and I packed our fishing things and went to Furnace Creek.
    Gloria and I tried to make up for lost time when she came to visit, and we stayed in bed until we were sore and then went for ice cream, or we went to a good restaurant every night, or I cooked for her, morels and a rack of venison. A chocolate soufflé. She wanted to try things in bed that I had only heard of. The separation worked in the odd way of increasing the intensity of the time we had together, almost as though we were having an affair, and the forbidden part of it only made us more passionate.
    At the end of a visit, we went to the airport, both of us so exhausted and sore as to be a little shaky, and, of course, we knew
the time was grinding on us. It was the romantic version of holding a piece of steel against a grinder, sparks and heat. But, still, in the time they ripped down the jail, when Mrs. Kilmer died, when more houses were built, Gloria was going through medical school, which took her a year longer than she had thought, and then she had done her internship, which was about to end. Now she was going to have to decide about where she would do her residency. It built like water behind a dam. Either I had to move her way or she had to come here, but we tried to avoid this or to turn it into a sort of engine of desire.
    And the separation had another aspect, too, which was that while it increased intensity, it also left us irritable, and it didn’t take much to get us saying those things you never forget. We missed each other. It was hard being apart.
    We tried to compensate, too, by doing favors for one another. For instance, Gloria’s grandmother lived close to me, not far from Albany, and Gloria asked me over the phone one day if I would buy her grandmother a TV. Gloria was going to come to visit soon, I thought, but she wanted me to get the TV for her grandmother, who hadn’t been feeling well. A nice, new flat-screen forty-two-inch Blu-ray with streaming video from Netflix would keep her grandmother occupied between the doses of Oxycontin she took for a neurological disease that had no cure. The old woman lived just north of Albany, about forty-five minutes away.
    â€œDo me this favor, will you?” said