Antonia's Choice Read Online Free PDF

look at me when I said good-bye.”
    â€œWhat did you expect? The
Rugrats
rule, remember?”
    She nodded, but we both knew the
Rugrats
probably had nothing to do with it.
    I avoided the family room and went back to the kitchen, where I kicked off my shoes and put a frozen pizza (just cheese) in the oven. Normally that would have been it, but tonight I could hear my mother’s voice telling me that Ben needed fresh fruits and vegetables—that his diet was part of his problem—but, mind you, only
part.
    I pulled out a Granny Smith apple and some carrots and went to work. It wasn’t something I did with a lot of prowess. In the almost seven years I’d been married, I’d been more about Chinese take-out and ready-to-nuke microwave dinners than anything homemade. My mother couldn’t figure out how I’d turned out that way, seeing how Bobbi could crank out chicken Florentine with a baby on each hip. Stephanie always winked at me on the sly when that conversation came up. She and I were cut from the same dishtowel.
    As I tossed the apple and carrots on the plate, something about the green and the orange that can’t be reproduced in a crayon color took me right back to being six years old, sitting at the picnic table on the back patio in Virginia, swinging my bare feet and smiling back at the fruit and veggie face that smiled up at me.
    â€œI can do that,” I said half-aloud. “What does it take to make a face with produce?”
    Just as Mama had always done, I formed a grin out of carrots and eyes out of apple wedges and rummaged in the cabinet for a raisin or two for nostrils. I grinned at it and carefully set it at Ben’s place at the counter.
    Mama had also “suggested”—she was always careful to suggest rather than actually tell me how to run my life—that Ben and I sit at the table for supper rather than park ourselves in front of the TV. “It’s going to take a few nights for him to get used to it,” she said. “But you two need some time to have conversations.”
    I couldn’t quite bring myself to sit with Ben in the breakfast room where we’d shared our meals with Mama and Stephanie for two weeks. It was far too empty in there now, and the formal dining room that opened from the other end of the kitchen was completely out of the question. Between the columns and the chandelier, I was pretty certain Martha Stewart herself would feel cowed. Besides, pizza and a carrot face would get lost on a mahogany table that seated twelve.
    The granite countertop was going to have to do, and while I waited for the timer to go off, I pulled out a couple of fringed place mats that looked like they could stand to be dry-cleaned and made an attempt to make the counter look festive. And then I couldn’t put it off any longer.
    â€œBen—supper’s ready!” I called out.
    I tried to sound as cheerful as Lindsay, though to me I was something reminiscent of a waitress at the Waffle House, barking out an order for hash browns scattered-smothered-chunked-and-diced. Ben must have thought so, too.
    â€œI wanna eat in here!” he called back, voice already teetering.
    â€œWe’re eating in here tonight. I want to talk to you.”
    â€œI don’t wanna talk.”
    â€œI do. Let’s go, Pal! Chop-chop!”
    â€œI don’t want to chop-chop.”
    â€œThat part’s okay because I don’t think I know what it means anyway. Come on, your pizza’s getting cold.”
    He didn’t answer. I heard the volume on the TV go up several notches. I went up several notches, too.
    â€œDo you want me to start counting?” I said.
    Still no answer.
    Forget that, Toni,
I told myself.
It never works anyway.
Lately I could get to fifteen and then drag him bodily to the desired destination and it still made no difference in his level of cooperation. If anything, he was even more defiant the next time.
    I