Among the Ten Thousand Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

arms, reminding her that she had arms, and a body, and what had happened to her body?
    “Don’t.” She pushed him off. It was exactly the only way she hadn’t wanted to let him touch her. She felt her arms shaking and thought, Good, let him see me shake. She wanted the whole room to shake and for him to know it was from something he had done. He saw her see into the box, with only a page stuck at the bottom. “Find the prize inside?”
    “It’s history, Debby. Ancient.” He waved the box as he spoke, and the last sheet fluttered out like a final gesture. “Over.”
    “You have no clue.”
    “It’s
been
over.”
    “You sad shit.” She spoke softly, but her teeth were sharp at him. “You know who gave it to me?
They
did.”
    Jack bent over to collect the escaped page. “Who’s they?”
    “ ‘Who’s they?’ People you barely know. Your children.”
    He stayed stooping, face to floor, the paper in his hand. When he stood, things would be different. Or, things were different already, but this was pause, this space of floor, this page.
Maybe bring some food on your way so we won’t have to go out.
The girl had shown up with a can of Pringles and a watermelon, like she’d never bought lunch before, never heard of sandwiches. He’d laughed about it at the time, though he’d been annoyed, and she had laughed too, though he could tell she’d been embarrassed and might have cried if he hadn’t then taken two of the chips and stuck them half into his mouth so they made a duck’s beak. That was a long time ago, when watermelon was in season. It was about to be in season again. Year-old melon and a thing of chips: how he would pay for them now, the moment that he stood.
    “Don’t act like you don’t hear.”
    “I’m not.” He stood. He hadn’t made the decision to, only it was a reflex, to answer her, and now here he was. “Who told them to open it? Was it addressed to them?”
    “How does that matter?” She pushed past him and carried the stack of plates to the kitchen. Dark in there, but she knew her way around. At the sink she ran the water. On low the faucet made a shrill sound like a whistle or a soft scream.
    Jack switched on the light over the counter where they let mail pile up. “What’d they say?” She squeezed green soap wheezy out of the plastic bottle. Her answer was too quiet for him to hear. “What?”
    “They don’t want to talk to you.”
    “I can’t hear you,” though that time he could.
    “I said they don’t want to talk to you.” She was scrubbing a pot.
    “Christ—could you not do that now? I mean are you kidding, doing that now?”
    She stopped the water and retreated to the bedroom, flicking drops from her fingers as she went. He thought she might have been about to cry, from how she’d kept him from seeing her face.
    Travolta trotted out as they came in, the loose of her belly swinging side to side. Deb looked all around the room. “What did you do with it?” She looked into the bathroom and saw the window open. “You did
not.
”
    “I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t know what to do.”
    “Go clean it up. Someone will find them.”
    He told her he didn’t care who found them, the idiots in this building.
    “
I
care. I see these people every day. I ride elevators with these people, I see them at the goddamn supermarket.”
    “Okay, all right. I’ll get the pages, and I’ll—I’ll throw them away.”
    “It doesn’t matter what you do with them. They won’t ever go away.”
    I hope that’s not true, he wanted to answer, but it seemed better not to say anything. “I’ll be back. Deb? I’ll be right back.”
    She sat on the bed with her head bent and would not show that she’d heard.
    —
    The door to the courtyard was through a long hall in the basement, past the boiler room that hummed, the fluorescents bright over the white washing machines, the playroom with its plastic castle and alphabet foam floor. In the basement, as in the