All You Could Ask For: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the only one in the world who still believed, my heart ached for her.
    So, there are those moments in my life practically every day. And when you combine them with all the regular ones that get to you as well, like the starving children with distended stomachs, it is basically a full-time job. I think the only person I’ve never felt sorry for in my whole life is me.
    Why would I? I was born with every advantage imaginable. My family is wealthy, I am healthy, I’ve always been able to choose whatever path I like. Yes, my father can be petulant and insensitive, and yes, he is now dating a woman only four years older than I am, but that isn’t really my issue. I feel sorry for my mother, who died so young, and my younger brother, who always idolized our father and has felt personally betrayed and disillusioned by Dad’s failings, but none of that has kept me from pursuing my interests or living my life. I have never imagined anyone would feel sorry for me, much less me feel it myself, until I typed “FuckLarryBird” into my husband’s laptop on the first morning of our honeymoon and found myself staring at a nude photo of a woman it took me a moment to recognize.
    The woman was attractive but by no means perfect, nothing you would ever see in Playboy , or whatever online site men use for their porn these days. She wasn’t airbrushed or artificially tanned, she wasn’t waxed and enhanced in all the most important places, but she was pretty, and about twenty years older than me. Or nineteen years, actually, to the day, now that I think of it. When I first met her on the campaign, I recalled, we laughed when we figured out we shared a birthday. I remember she said: “Funny, I could have been your babysitter.” It didn’t seem so funny at the time, and even less funny now was the note she’d attached to the photo.
    Something to remember me by while you’re in Hawaii with your daughter.
    So now I was just running, as hard and as fast as I could. I didn’t know where I was going, but that really didn’t matter. Because when you’re running away from something rather than running toward it, it doesn’t make much difference which way you go.
KATHERINE
    THEY SAY IT’S BETTER to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
    Well, how fucking stupid are they ?
    That expression, or the sentiment behind it, is one of those things we’ve made up to make ourselves feel better. Like when we say it’s good luck if it rains on your wedding day. Of course that isn’t good luck; it is, in fact, the very definition of bad luck. But we announce that it is good luck so we don’t have to feel bad about being wet at our own wedding. I remember when my friend Heidi was married, right here in Manhattan, she and her fiancé arranged for a double-decker bus with an open top to transport the guests from the church on the Upper West Side to a social club by Gramercy Park. The trouble was that it poured. I mean, poured . My lasting recollections are of Heidi with a garbage bag over her dress and a shower cap over her hair to keep the rain from spoiling all her photos, and all the guests crammed into the lower level of the double-decker bus. I ask you, was that good luck?
    Of course it doesn’t mean the marriage is doomed. In fact, Heidi remains happily married and has three little boys whose names currently escape me, but the point remains there was nothing lucky about the rain on her wedding day, and neither is there anything better about loving and losing than never loving at all.
    “Oh, fuck him,” I said.
    “What’s that, Katherine?”
    I had forgotten about Maurice. “Nothing.”
    “You keep talking to yourself, I’m gonna need to take you somewhere other than that office,” he said cheerily. “You may need to see a doctor.”
    I do love Maurice. He is a genuinely nice man, and in my experience those are not so easy to find. I think if there is such a thing as reincarnation— and if there is any justice in the