Among the Missing Read Online Free PDF

weighed with gloom and concern, but still willing to drink beer and play cards or Monopoly and talk drunkenly into the night. She thought back because almost ten years had now passed, and she still felt like a stranger among them. When the children had been younger, it was easier to ignore, but now it seemed more and more obvious. She didn’t belong.
    She had never had any major disagreements with Tobe’s family, but there had developed, she felt, a kind of unspoken animosity, perhaps simple indifference. To Carlin, the second-oldest, Cheryl was, and would always remain, merely his brother’s wife. Carlin was a policeman, crew-cut, ruddy, with the face of a bully, and Cheryl couldn’t ever remember having much of a conversationwith him. To Carlin, she imagined, she was just another of the womenfolk, like his wife, Karissa, with whom she was often left alone. Karissa was a horrid little mouse of a woman with small, judgmental eyes. She hovered over the brothers as they ate and didn’t sit down until she was certain everyone was served; then she hopped up quickly to offer a second helping or clear a soiled plate. There were times, when Karissa was performing her duties, that she regarded Cheryl with a glare of pure, self-righteous hatred. Though of course, Karissa was always “nice”—they would talk about children, or food, and Karissa would sometimes offer compliments. “I see you’ve lost weight,” she’d say, or: “Your hair looks much better, now that you’ve got it cut!”
    Cheryl might have liked Tobe’s next brother, Randy—he was a gentle soul, she thought, but he was also a rather heavy drinker, probably an alcoholic. She’d had several conversations with Randy that had ended with him weeping, brushing his hand “accidentally” across the small of her back or her thigh, wanting to hug. She had long ago stopped participating in the Friday night card games, but Randy still sought her out, wherever she was trying to be unobtrusive. “Hey, Cheryl,” he said, earnestly pressing his shoulder against the door frame. “Why don’t you come and drink a beer with us?” He gave her his sad grin. “Are you being antisocial again?”
    “I’m just enjoying my book,” she said. She lifted it so he could see the cover, and he read aloud in a kind of dramatized way.
    “
The House of Mirth
,” he pronounced. “What is it? Jokes?” he said hopefully.
    “Not really,” she said. “It’s about society life in old turn-of-the-century New York.”
    “Ah,” he said. “You and Wendell could probably have a conversation about that. He always hated New York!”
    She nodded. No doubt Wendell would have read
House of Mirth
and would have an opinion of it that he would offer to her in his squinting, lopsided way. He had surprised her, at first, with his intelligence, which he masked behind a kind of exaggerated folksiness and that haw-hawing laugh. But the truth was, Wendell read widely, and he could talk seriously about any number of subjects if he wanted. She and Wendell had shared a love of books and music—he had once stunned her by sitting down at his piano and playing Debussy, then Gershwin, then an old Hank Williams song, which he sang along with in a modest, reedy tenor. There were times when it had seemed as if they could have been friends—and then, without warning, he would turn on her. He would tell her a racist joke, just to offend her; he would call her “politically correct” and would goad her with his far-right opinions, the usual stuff—gun control, feminism, welfare. He would get a certain look in his eyes, sometimes right in the middle of talking, a calculating, shuttered expression would flicker across his face. It gave her the creeps, perhaps even more now than before, and she put her hand to her mouth as Randy stood, still wavering, briefly unsteady, in the doorway. In the living room, Tobe and Carlin suddenly burst into laughter, and Randy’s eyes shifted.
    “I miss him,” Randy