Read The Adjustment for Free Online Page B

presence beyond her eyes getting a little wet, not even on the occasion of her mother’s death.
    She struggled to get control and spoke again. “You don’t love me any more.”
    Jumping Jesus, what do you say to that? “Course I do, baby, what are you talking about?”
    She swallowed. She was regaining some of her control. “You’re out and about almost every night, I eat dinner with your mother more often than with you, ever since I told you about the baby you’ve barely touched me. You like that boss of yours more than me.”
    I laughed at that, and she gave me a look of pure snake venom. Beautiful and feminine as she was, she was a big girl nonetheless, and she’d hit me before, and hard. “Baby, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I can’t stand the son of a bitch.”
    “Then why are you out with him every night?”
    “Because since I got back, that’s what my job is. Babysitter. Didn’t you ever wonder why the head of the Publicity and Marketing Department doesn’t go in to work most days until ten in the morning? My job is to keep a muzzle on the old man, and the only public relations I do is keeping the old pervert out of the Beacon and the Eagle .”
    She wiped both cheeks with the heels of her palms. “You aren’t seeing somebody else?”
    “Hell, no, why would I? I got the sweetest piece of tail in the state right here at home.” Despite herself I had made her giggle. “If you doubt me you can come along some night and watch me and the bodyguard sitting around watching the boss carouse.” In fact Collins would love that; he’d probably make a pass at her, pregnant or not.
    “If you’re not seeing somebody else how come we’re down to four or five times a week any more?”
    “Every night’s a tall order, baby. I’m thirty-one years old, and coming home late the way I do . . . half the time you’re asleep anyway.”
    “I’m not asleep right now,” she said with the suggestion of a smile, lifting her nightie and exposing that exceptionally lovely torso. I stared at her body, her pubic hair especially black against her slightly swollen winter-white belly, nipples wide and erect, and said a little prayer of thanks for this heaven-sent carnal bounty.
     
    DOCTOR EZRA GROFF kept a little house just west of Hillside he’d reconfigured as a doctor’s office, with two examining rooms and a little surgery in the back. For a long time he’d been the town’s most reliable angelmaker, but toward the end of the thirties there was a local crackdown and he started referring girls in trouble to out-of-town docs like Beck in Kansas City. Enough girls of prominent birth had been helped out of sticky situations that he avoided prosecution, and his practice had survived, though it couldn’t be said to have thrived. I was the only patient in the waiting room at ten in the morning.
    His elderly nurse Lois had me fill out some paperwork, since I hadn’t been in since ’41. Her bright red hair had gone pinkish and she’d put on a good deal of weight, which may have accounted for the slight limp she’d taken on since I saw her last. She chatted amiably while I wrote, talked about what a precocious little boy I’d been, insisting on knowing the Latin names for treatments and ailments and body parts when I was as young as five. I liked Lois. According to my father, she’d been Dr. Groff’s girlfriend as well as his nurse in the old days, long before Dr. Groff’s wife was carted off to the state lunatic asylum at Larned. I wondered if they were still at it.
    In the examination room I sat on the table with my shirt needlessly off on nurse Lois’s instructions. The whole place smelled like mercurochrome and ammonia and mold.
    “Well, young Ogden,” Groff said when he came in, stubbing a dead butt into the ashtray. “Back from the war, I see.”
    “Back since spring,” I said.
    “And what’s troubling you that the VA can’t fix for free?”
    “It’s for a friend.”
    He snorted. “It