Read Everything for Free Online Page B

their share.
    Scolding and earnest, even to her own ears. Would you like to see my Birkenstocks?
    * * *
    Howard didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. He said, That’s the only thing, you know—there’s nothing wrong with just sitting on the place, I mean, it’s not going to go down in value and it seems like it works for you. There’s no real reason. But, you know, the neighbors get together and put through an SID, or you get reappraised. I’m just saying that other people might end up making this decision for you.
    You’re the Devil, aren’t you?
    Howard Emerson seemed startled.
    Come to tempt me with the whole wicked world, she said.
    I’m just trying to keep myself in Cokes and pizza, he said. Keep the horses in oats. I don’t know anything about the wicked world.
    What kind of horses?
    Nothing fancy, said Howard Emerson. Basically I’m running an old folks’ home for horses. Or maybe like a bar, you know, a bunch of old guys sitting around shooting the breeze. I like them fine but they’re no good for anything.
    This seemed to June to ask as many questions as it answered but she didn’t want to press. Besides, she had other fish to fry. Would she be rich? It was like somebody had asked to marry her, and now she had to decide. Howard Emerson, she thought. The Devil himself. What would baby Jesus do?

*
    Layla dreamt of that apartment where the soldiers found the butchery, the headless disembodied corpses, the knives, the fat sleek butchers with their pink skin …. She knew one of the dead, she didn’t know why. Ghostly she watched, like a camera in the corner, an eye and nothing more. Like a Picasso, she thought,
Picasso, Picasso, Picasso
. The word was still repeating in her head when she woke, disassembled and senseless. She could taste it in her mouth, gray-blue and brown. Bitter Picasso. The very end of summer.

*
    RL regards the telephone . It rings again. It is his ex-wife on the line, the ex-wife who has left him five messages in three days, none of which say more than
Call me
.
    Eventually he will have to answer, but he can’t think of any reason it has to be now.
    He doesn’t like to talk to her. He doesn’t like to lie, and he lies whenever he talks to her—not even about consequential things, about the small stuff, the everyday, even about Layla. RL finds Dawn confusing and difficult, and he doesn’t want her in his life. It’s not even that he hates her—it would be simpler if he did—but instead he feels this basement mess of emotions: pity and exasperation and sometimes even nostalgia for a life, a partnership anddream that they never actually had. A yard sale of a feeling, stuff he hasn’t thought about in forever and doesn’t want and now he has to do something about it. She should have a nice life if she wanted one. RL was fine with that. He just wished that she would have her nice life somewhere else—in Hawaii, for instance, where she actually went for a couple of years, making his life easy.
    Dawn is not about making his life easy.
    The telephone stops ringing, and then starts again. It’s her again. He loved her once, he must have. They made this miracle child together. Where did that feeling go? When did she become this pure and holy pain in the ass?
    Hello, he said.
    Robert, Dawn said. I’ve been calling and calling.
    My phone was broken, he lied. I didn’t even know!
    Have you heard about Betsy? she asked.
    RL fought the urge to disconnect. This could only be the preface to bad news, Dawn’s favorite subject.
    What about her?
    Well, it’s back.
    What do you mean,
back?
    * * *
    I guess she was having some neck pain or something, Dawn said. She went to the clinic up in Bigfork and I guess they found something when they did the X-ray.
    A kind of glee in her voice that repulsed RL like a sickness, which it was. This was the real dope, the inside information.
    So I guess she’s coming down on Monday for some more imaging, Dawn said, and I was wondering if she could stay