Read I Thought You Were Dead for Free Online Page B

his
Scholastic Weekly
for over an hour.
    The house was a three-bedroom stucco Federal-style home in South Minneapolis. His parents had put on a new roof the summer before, with plans to sell, but they hadn’t found any condos to their liking yet. There’d been talk of their finding some retirement community down south, in Arizona or Texas, but it never got beyond talk. He couldn’t imagine them living anywhere but Minnesota.
    Bits showed him where Beverly hid the spare key, under a flowerpot on the front porch, then used her own key to let them in. Paul dropped his bags at the bottom of the stairs. Bits told him he might want to build a fire in the woodstove and askedhim if there was anything he needed. It was going to be strange. As best he could recall, he’d never spent a night in the house alone.
    â€œJust the phone,” he told her.
    Bits asked him who he was calling. “You’ve got a girlfriend?”
    â€œYes, she’s a girl, and yes, she’s a friend.”
    Bits furrowed her brow. They were in the kitchen.
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?” she said, leaning against the counter. “Are you seeing this person or not?”
    â€œSort of.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
    â€œWhat are you?” Paul asked. “A private detective?”
    â€œDon’t get all whiny, Paulie,” she said. “I’m just asking because I didn’t think you were ready to jump back into the dating pool.”
    He noticed his mother had removed his wedding pictures from the photo gallery she kept on her refrigerator door, including the five-by-eight of him and Karen cutting their wedding cake, him in his tux, her in her gown and veil. He wondered what Beverly had done with the photographs. She had boxes of thirty-year-old Christmas cards in the attic. She’d never get rid of something as historically significant as a wedding picture.
    â€œI’m not ready,” he told his sister. “That’s the whole point. I’m in the pool but only up to my ankles. It’s sort of a mutual I-don’t-want-a-relationship relationship. We just really like each other, but we’re trying not to get ahead of ourselves.”
    â€œIs it exclusive?” his sister asked.
    â€œFor me it is,” he answered. “She has a preexisting relationship.”
    â€œShe does?”
    â€œYeah, but it’s not going anywhere. She’s free to see me if she wants to, and she told him about me. There’s nothing sneaky going on. Nobody’s playing anybody. We’re very open abouteverything — there’s no rule that says you’re not allowed to date more than one person at a time.”
    â€œWell,” his sister said, “just make sure she’s good to you. I don’t want you getting involved with the wrong person.”
    â€œThat’s exactly why we’re hanging out. If I met the right person right now, I wouldn’t know what to do. We’re not getting involved. That’s what makes her right.”
    As much as he’d always loved women (beginning in second grade, when he’d been unable to take his eyes off Miss Lasseter’s pendulous boobs for the entire school year), he’d recently come to the conclusion that he didn’t know very much about them. He honestly couldn’t say if he thought about love too little or too much. He recognized that there was a mystery and a magic to it and had spent the past twenty years trying to solve the mystery, even though he knew he ran the risk of destroying the magic. By the end of his relationships, he’d usually spent more time analyzing and thinking about love than he’d spent actually enjoying or participating in it. Sometimes it seemed as if it was the guys who gave it the least amount of thought who had the best luck, the one-dimensional monobrows with minimal vocabularies whom women seemed drawn to. For Paul, the longer his