Read Maybe the Moon for Free Online

he was the only guy who’d ever want me.”
    “Oh, honey.”
    “Ya know?”
    “No, I don’t know. Look, Renee. Just because some men can’t sustain a relationship long enough to…well, that doesn’t mean…” I didn’t finish, since I couldn’t really say for certain where the fault lay. The truth is, I almost never see Renee around her boyfriends; when she’s got something going, she tends to hang out at the guy’s place. It’s possible, given her insecurity, that she turns all clingy and desperate on the third date, scaring off even the nice ones.
    Looking for another way out, I reached over and tucked my hand into hers—my “baby starfish,” as Renee calls it, into her huge catcher’s mitt—and told her it was time to lighten up. Hand holding almost always works on her, but I save it as a last resort to keep from wearing out the effect. Also, there’s an unsettling sort of come-to-Mama thing that happens when the great and the small converge sentimentally. I’ve never been completely comfortable with it.
    Renee smiled wanly. “But what else could explain it?”
    “Explain what?”
    She shrugged her big fuzzy blue shoulders. “Why they don’t stick around.”
    “Because they’re buttheads.”
    She uttered an impatient sigh. “How can they all be buttheads?”
    “I don’t know. It’s one of the great wonders of the modern world. An all-butthead extravaganza.” Removing my hand from hers, I wrote across the sky with my forefinger. “ The Night of a Thousand Buttheads .”
    She giggled. Finally.
    “And it could be me, you know.” I threw this in breezily, as if it had just crossed my mind. Cooped up in that damned house so much, with too much time to stew in my juices, I’ve started to fret about all sorts of things.
    “What do you mean?”
    I shrugged. “Maybe it’s me who’s scaring them away.”
    “Cady…” Oh, how wounded she looked. “I brag about you all the time.”
    “Well, that’s what I mean. Not everybody’s like you, honey. Maybe you shouldn’t always mention it right away.”
    Her hand fluttered to rest on her bosom as she stared at me in genuine horror. “That is the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
    “It’s just a theory.”
    “Well, it’s a dumb one. People are impressed that I room with you. Especially after I tell them who you were.”
    Were . Get it? Sometimes she makes me sound like the Norma Desmond of elfdom.
    “I just meant,” I explained calmly, “that some guys might think of you as encumbered.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “You know. That you and I are a unit.”
    She gave a girlish little gasp. “Lesbians?”
    “No, sweetie.” I chuckled.
    “Then what?”
    “I don’t know.” This was getting muddier by the minute. “I just hope people realize you’re a free agent. I mean…free to go your own way.”
    Now she looked utterly stricken.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “You want me to move out?”
    I just shook my head and smiled at her.
    “Well, it sounded like it.”
    “You’re such a mess,” I said.
    Renee’s lower lip plumped like a pillow. “Well, you are too.”
    Both of us, I think, were greatly relieved.
     
    Since that night a lot has happened. A check arrived from the cellulite people the following day, just barely enabling me to pay off the dentist and my other bad checks. Apparently they are going to air the infomercial—in a matter of weeks, they claim—so I’m bracing myself for the endless replay of this indignity. I can’t even justify it as exposure, since all you see are two fat little legs sticking out from under a Mylar and Styrofoam jar. Renee is beside herself, of course, and is currently alerting the planet.
    The money will buy me time, at least, so I’ve embarked on a program of self-improvement in preparation for taking a meeting with Arnie Green. Yeah, I called him, and Renee knows all about it. That’s why I’m stretched out here on the air mattress, cram-tanning like crazy in the thinnest