Free Beneath the Weight of Sadness by Gerald L. Dodge Page B

that Ethan had given me the copy was the saddest part of this incomprehensible loss. Oddly, I began to dream about the book. I dreamed it would be on my desk under a single sheet of paper, and once I dreamed it was in the refrigerator leaning against a half gallon of milk, the spine as red as strawberries.
    My classes began in less than three weeks and so finally, reluctantly, I bought a copy in the small bookstore in Persia. I wasn’t surprised I had to order it. A single copy of The House of Seven Gables was the only Hawthorne book in the shop. The lady behind the counter, someone I’d seen on occasion at church and in the small shops in the square, assured me she would have it for me in two days. I weighed my options and placed the order. I really had no other choice. I had to read the novel and take notes before the semester began.
    It was the morning two days later and I was sitting at the counter in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading some recent criticism on Hawthorne—the critic compared him to Richard Ford and the elevation of the human heart through self-flagellation—when I heard Truman enter the room. I didn’t look up but saw peripherally that he was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers with his heel outside the shoe, a habit he’d instituted a year before. It drove Ethan crazy, as the sneakers Truman demanded were expensive and wearing down the heel was a waste of good money. I just shrugged it off as teenage-hood. He disappeared behind the refrigerator door he’d opened and I lost concentration.
    We all have our pet peeves and mine is the inordinate amount of time both my husband and son spend staring into the confines of a cold pantry the size of a generous broom-closet. I waited. I could see his hand on the handle, his fingers tapping to a rhythm he either heard on his iPod or in his lovely brain. In the time he stood there I could’ve completed two more paragraphs of what was turning out to be a rather interesting parallel of thought between Hawthorne and Ford—I had begun to wonder where Melville would fit into all this.
    “Nothing has changed from last night, Tru,” I finally said.
    His body remained hidden, but his face appeared out from the door. He smiled. “How do you know Dad didn’t raid the hell out of it?”
    “Don’t say hell. You’re only thirteen.”
    He stared at me for a moment in amusement.
    “I wonder where I picked up the habit, Amy?”
    He’d begun to call me Amy since I’d insisted he read Salinger’s Franny and Zoey . I wanted him to know it wasn’t abnormal to be precocious. Lately I’d been wondering if it had been such a good idea.
    “And don’t call me Amy. Mom to you, thank you.”
    He closed the door and stood looking at some of what was magnetized on the door. Then he reached behind his back and pulled out a book, came over to his end of the counter and slid it toward me. It was my copy of The Scarlet Letter.
    Before I could say anything, he said, “The book’s about love. It’s as simple as that.”
    “What the hell, Truman Engroff! I’ve been looking all over for this book. Where did you find it?”
    I picked it up and fanned through the pages.
    “I Googled some of what has been said about the book and most of it is bullshit…I mean what people say about it.”
    “Where did you find this book, Truman?”
    He shrugged his shoulders and leaned his elbows on the counter. “I found it in your bookshelf in your office. I liked the title.”
    “I’ve been looking everywhere for this book. You can’t just do that without saying something to me. You can’t imagine…”
    “I saw what Dad wrote in the front. I can’t see Dad sitting in your classroom without interrupting every two seconds.”
    “I’m so angry with you and so relieved.”
    “I mean, I was thinking,” he went on, ignoring my obvious irritation, “that what really matters in the story is not what happened when Hester and Pearl came out of the prison, but what happened before