Angel Falls by Kristin Hannah Page A

busy. They had to be busier than a one-armed paper hanger. Whatever that was. “Yep,” Bret said.
    “Lots of folks’ll be caught by surprise with this weather. It’s early for snow.”
    For the next few miles, Dad didn’t say a thing. As they edged out of town, the paved road turned into snow-covered gravel, and there weren’t any other tracks at all. Dad put the Explorer in four-wheel drive and lowered his speed.
    Bret wished Daddy hadn’t mentioned visiting Mommy. Just the thought made Bret feel sick. Usually he pretended that she was out of town, at a horse show in Canada.
    He
hated
it when he was reminded that she was in the hospital. It was bad enough that he remembered THE DAY. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the memories came anyway, the ones he hated, the ones thatlived curled in the wheels of his Corvette bed and came at him every night as soon as Daddy turned off the lights and shut the door.
    Wait, Mommy. The jump is in the wrong place. Someone musta moved it …
    Bret turned to look at Dad. “Do you
swear
Mom’s gonna wake up?”
    Dad didn’t answer right away. When he finally did, it was in a quiet voice. “I can’t
swear
she’ll be fine, son. I can’t even swear that she’ll wake up. But I believe it with all my heart and soul, and she needs you to believe it, too.”
    “I believe it.”
    He said it too fast; his daddy knew he was lying.
    After that, Bret leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see his mom lying in that hospital bed. He liked it better when he pretended she was still alive. Sometimes he could close his eyes and imagine her standing beside his bed, with her hair short and spiky around her face and her arms crossed. She’d be smiling at him, and she looked like she used to—no bruises or cuts at all. And she always said the same thing:
How’s my favorite boy in the whole world?
    But it was just a silly old dream, and it didn’t mean a thing. Bret might be little, and maybe sometimes he didn’t know what to do with the remainder at the end of a long-division problem, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that fairy tales and cartoons weren’t real. Everybody knew that Wile E. Coyote couldn’t
really
fall from an airplane and live or that princesses who atepoisoned apples and slept in glass cases for years couldn’t wake up.
    And mommies who fell off horses and cracked their heads against the wooden post at the end of the arena were really dead.

Chapter Seven

    Liam stared at the mail in his lap. Almost all of it was addressed to Mikaela. Bills from the Country Corner General Store and the feed store, stabling and lessons checks from the twelve families who paid to board their horses at the barn, postcards and leaflets and flyers. A postcard announcing Nordstrom’s latest sale.
    In ordinary times, he would have gone into the kitchen and tossed the postcard on the kitchen table and said, “Oh, no, the Christmas sale is starting….” She would have laughed easily, turning away from the stove or the refrigerator or the washing machine as she said, “We’ll just sell a few shares of Microsoft to get me through….”
    “Daddy, why are we sitting at the mailbox?”
    “Oh. Sorry about that, Bretster. I was just thinking about something.” Tossing the pile of mail into the well between them, he eased his foot off the brake pedal and pressed cautiously on the gas. The Explorer’s tiresspun on the mushy rim of the road, then grabbed on to the gravel and lurched forward. Ahead of them, the deserted road was a twisted river of fallen snow. Towering Douglas firs and cedar trees, their downslung branches dusted white, hemmed the thin strip of road that Ian Campbell had carved from the forest almost fifty years ago. There were a few other farmhouses along the way, their slanted, rock-dented mailboxes stuck at haphazard angles on spindly wooden legs.
    “Maybe we could build a snowman after dinner,” Liam said awkwardly, wondering where Mikaela kept