Over the years my half brothers, our mothers, stepmothers, and I had looked into his office, a packrat midden of strewn note cards, manuscript pages, newspapers, boxes, overdue books, empty cans of Diet Rite Cola, and airplane bottles of Malibu Rum. Long before his retirement from Central Illinois, everyone in the family but me had moved far away from the town of Normal, whose name my father daily defied. So I was the one who had to drop in to see how he was surviving. This time was no ordinary visit. I’d made a special trip, and though I told myself not to worry I was growing uneasy. I parked the Prius in front of the FORECLOSURE: HOME FOR SALE sign at his curb and climbed over a snowbank. All the neighbors except my father had plowed their driveways and shoveled their walks, so I was up to my knees in snow so soft it squeaked under my sneakers as I high-stepped toward the door. There was his old Mercury Mystique, under a white shell, parked outside the junk-filled garage. It had been three days since Christmas Eve, when a librarian I knew at the university e-mailed, saying she’d heard about the foreclosure and hoped my family was coping over the holidays.
What do You think about The End Of The Book (2014)?
