Hearts In Atlantis
Chapter One
A Boy and His Mother. Bobby's Birthday.
The New Roomer. Of Time and Strangers.
Bobby Garfield's father had been one of those fellows who start losing their
hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so.
Randall Garfield was spared this extremity by dying of a heart attack at
thirty-six. He was a real-estate agent, and breathed his last on the kitchen
floor of someone else's house. The potential buyer was in the living room,
trying to call an ambulance on a disconnected phone, when Bobby's dad passed
away. At this time Bobby was three. He had vague memories of a man tickling him
and then kissing his cheeks and his forehead. He was pretty sure that man had
been his dad. Sadly missed, it said on Randall Garfield's gravestone, but his
mom never seemed all that sad, and as for Bobby himself ... well, how could you
miss a guy you could hardly remember?
Eight years after his father's death, Bobby fell violently in love with the
twenty-six-inch Schwinn in the window of the Harwich Western Auto. He hinted to
his mother about the Schwinn in every way he knew, and finally po ... read full excerpt from: Hearts in Atlantis ebook
