Read Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story for Free Online

isn’t carved in stone,” and Marion loses her temper.
    “What are you talking about?” she says. “I’m coming down with a flu bug and here you are herding me off to divorce court.”
    The idea of telling anybody, even Emma, is appalling to her. Here in Colville she has no fame. That has been the miracle of living in Colville. When she left Garvey and came here to live, all anyone knew about her was that she had enough money to buy the old plumbing supply building and turn it into a pet store and an apartment. She could laugh and nobody thought, How can she laugh? Eventually she could talk about her divorce from John Bucci because other people got divorced. Until she told Sam about the murder, not a soul knew that she had the nerve to open a store in a retail recession and to iceskate on the Grand River during a thaw and to recount Mrs. Hodgson’s pet-death stories without batting an eye because she was someone who had survived the most terrible thing that was going to happen to her.
    She thinks that telling Sam was what made this other terrible thing happen. That talking about the murder here in Colville, where it had been under wraps for ten years, was like releasing a deadly virus. If it didn’t instantly turn him into a transsexual (and who knows? It’s not as though she hasn’t witnessed the frailty of natural laws) then it did make her fall in love with him, the first man since John she goes and falls in love with.
    Before that she wouldn’t have dreamed that he’d be the one for her. He was the new man in town. The mysterious stranger, the catch. And then she started seeing him arm in arm with Bernie, a topless waitress at the Bear Pit. She saw the two of them kissing once, in the bank line-up, but the first time hekissed
her,
and she asked, “What about Bernie?” he laughed and said, “God, no. I mean, she’s great, it’s just …”
    Marion waited. She wanted to hear it—the thing she could possibly have over a sexpot like Bernie. But all she got was, “She’s not you,” said so reverently, though, that she kissed him and told him she loved him, too, a delayed response to his declaration of a minute before. She was still bowled over by it. If he’d come out with anything else, she would have started crying. She’d just finished telling him about the murder. The name Bert Kella hadn’t crossed her lips in a long time, and it lingered in the air like a toxic gas that burned her eyes.
    “He shot himself a few hours later,” she said. “What my brother always says is, ‘He saved me the trouble.’ “
    “I love you,” Sam said.
    She looked at him. He was blinking as if from a tic. “Pardon?” she said. He put down his cans of dog food, came around the counter, took her face in his hands and kissed her like a man digging into a meal. Between kisses he kept saying he loved her, but in a voice so full of doom that she figured he must have said the same thing to Bernie.
    That tone of doom and everything associated with it—the looks of defeat, humility, anguish, the hesitation, the guarded answers, the withdrawing, the physical modesty (he wouldn’t even take off his undershirt!)—she got wrong all the way down the road. With Bernie out of the picture her immediate sense was that some emotional deprivation, most likely the death of his parents, had left him with the idea that he didn’t deserve love. So her job, her joyous crusade, became to persuade him that he
did
deserve it. He would sigh for no reason and she would say, “I love you.” “I love you,” she would say when she picked up the phone and it was him. He had a frailty she had never witnessed before in a grown man, not so much because of the way he looked, although he was slim and big-eyed, and not because he seemed frightened of loving her, either. It wassomething else—his dreaminess, partly, which she felt had to do with a spiritual bent, a private purity. Just as a room’s perils leap out at you when you bring a baby