Read Taking Care for Free Online Page B

vent.
    “Emergency,” she’d say. “Come in please.”

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    On the most recent trip, Sam had called his lawyer from a Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike. The lawyer told him that Sam’s divorce had become final that morning. This had been Sam’s third marriage. He and Annie had seemed very compatible. They tended to each other realistically, with affection and common sense. Then Annie decided to go back to school. She became interested in animal behaviorism. Books accumulated. She was never at home. She was always on field trips, in thickets or on beaches, or visiting some ornithologist in Barnstable. She began keeping voluminous notebooks. Sam came across the most alarming things written in her hand.
    Mantids are cannibalistic and males often literally lose their heads to the females. The result, as far as successful mating is concerned, is beneficial, since the suboesophageal ganglion is frequently removed and with it any inhibition on the copulatory center; the activities of male abdomen are carried out with more vigor than when the body was intact.
     
    “Annie, Annie,” Sam had pleaded. “Let’s have some people over for drinks. Let’s prune the apple tree. Let’s bake the orange cake you always made for my birthday.”
    “I have never made an orange cake in my life,” Annie said.
    “Annie,” Sam said, “don’t they have courses in seventeenth-century romantic verse or something?”
    “You drink too much,” Annie said. “You get quarrelsome every night at nine. Your behavior patterns are severely limited.”
    Sam clutched his head with his hands.
    “Plus you are reducing my ability to respond to meaningful occurrences, Sam.”
    Sam poured himself another Scotch. He lit a cigarette. He applied a mustache with a piece of picnic charcoal.
    “I am Captain Blood,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”
    “When Errol Flynn died, he had the body of a man of ninety,” Annie said. “His brain was unrealistic from alcohol.”
    She had already packed the toast rack and the pewter and rolled up the Oriental rug.
    “I am just taking this one Wanda Landowska recording,” she said. “That’s all I’m taking in the way of records.”
    Sam, with his charcoal mustache, sat very straight at his end of the table.
    “The variations in our life have ceased to be significant,” Annie said.
    Sam’s house was on a hill overlooking a cove. The cove was turning into a saltwater marsh. Sam liked marshes but he thought he had bought property on a deep-water cove where he could take his boat in and out. He wished that he were not involved in the process of his cove turning into a marsh. When he had first bought the place, he was so excited about everything that he had a big dinner party at which he served
soupe de poisson
using only the fish he had caught himself from the cove. He could not, it seems, keep himself from doing this each year. Each year, the
soupe de poisson
did not seem as nice as it had the year before. About a year before Annie left him, she suggested that they should probably stop having that particular dinner party. Sam felt flimflammed.
    When Sam returned to the table in the Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike after learning about his divorce, Elizabeth didn’t look at him.
    “I have been practicing different expressions, none of which seem appropriate,” Elizabeth said.
    “Well,” Sam said.
    “I might as well be honest,” Elizabeth said.
    Sam bit into his egg. He did not feel lean and young and unencumbered.
    “In the following sentence, the same word is used in each of the missing spaces, but pronounced differently.” Elizabeth’s head was bowed. She was reading off the place mat. “Don’t look at yours now, Sam,” she said, “the answer’s on it.” She slid his place mat off the table, spilling coffee on his cuff in theprocess.
“A prominent _____and man came into a restaurant at the height of the rush hour. The waitress was_____to serve him