A Good Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page B

party. It was Darcy’s father who found her body and carried it home through half a mile of pine woods. Darcy—stationed in the living room, monitoring the phone and trying to keep her mother calm—had been the first to see him. He came walking up the lawn under the harsh glare of a full winter moon with his breath puffing out in white clouds. Darcy’s initial thought (thiswas still terrible to her) had been of those corny old black-and-white love-movies they sometimes showed on TCM, the ones where some guy carries his new bride across the threshold of their happy honeymoon cottage while fifty violins pour syrup onto the soundtrack.
    Bob Anderson, Darcy had discovered, could relate in a way many people could not. He hadn’t lost a brother or sister; he had lost his best friend. The boy had darted out into the road to grab an errant throw during a game of pickup baseball (not Bob’s throw, at least; no baseball player, he’d been swimming that day), had been struck by a delivery truck, and died in the hospital shortly afterward. This coincidence of old sorrows wasn’t the only thing that made their pairing seem special to her, but it was the one that made it feel somehow mystical—not a coincidence but a planned thing.
    “Stay in Vermont, Bobby. Go to the estate sale. I love you for being concerned, but if you come running home, I’ll feel like a kid. Then I’ll be mad.”
    “Okay. But I’m going to call you tomorrow at seven-thirty. Fair warning.”
    She laughed, and was relieved to hear it was a real one . . . or so close as to make no difference. And why shouldn’t she be allowed a real laugh? Just why the heck not? She loved him, and would give him the benefit of the doubt. Of every doubt. Nor was this a choice. You could not turn off love—even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love of twenty-seven years—the wayyou’d turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart, and the heart had its own imperatives.
    “Bobby, you always call at seven-thirty.”
    “Guilty as charged. Call tonight if you—”
    “—need anything, no matter what the hour,” she finished for him. Now she almost felt like herself again. It was really amazing, the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover. “I will.”
    “Love you, honey.” The coda of so many conversations over the years.
    “Love you, too,” she said, smiling. Then she hung up, put her forehead against the wall, closed her eyes, and began weeping before the smile could leave her face.

- 6 -
    Her computer, an iMac now old enough to look fashionably retro, was in her sewing room. She rarely used it for anything but email and eBay, but now she opened Google and typed in Marjorie Duvall’s name. She hesitated before adding Beadie to the search, but not long. Why prolong the agony? It would come up anyway, she was sure of it. She hit Enter, and as she watched the little wait-circle go around and around at the top of the screen, those cramps struck again. She hurried to the bathroom, sat down on the commode, and took care of her business with her face in her hands. There was a mirror on the back of the door, and she didn’t want to see herself in it. Why was itthere, anyway? Why had she allowed it to be there? Who wanted to watch themselves sitting on the pot? Even at the best of times, which this most certainly wasn’t?
    She went back to the computer slowly, dragging her feet like a child who knows she is about to be punished for the kind of thing Darcy’s mother had called a Big Bad. She saw that Google had provided her with over five million results for her search: o omnipotent Google, so generous and so terrible. But the first one actually made her laugh; it invited her to follow Marjorie Duvall Beadie on Twitter. Darcy felt she could ignore that one. Unless she was wrong (and how wildly grateful that would make her), the Marjorie she was looking for had Twittered her last tweet some time ago.
    The second result was from the Portland Press