Aquamarine Read Online Free PDF

parked outside and thought.... He has already seen his mistake, but it’s too late. Anyone looking at him, looking at Jesse, would know. Alice Avery could be a post, and know.
    “My friend Wayne,” Jesse says. No point pretending he’s the meter reader.
    He nods. “I was just passing by. Saw your truck. I got a shipment for you. Salt and pepper shakers.” He says this and they listen and no one believes a word. The worst of it is that Jesse can’t even feel fear. Her only emotion at the moment is a terrible sadness that because she has to show Alice the rest of the house, she won’t be able to have this time with Wayne. She has lost one of their finite number of times left together.
     
    That night, Laurel and Claude Owen are by to play Sheepshead. Laurel is Jesse’s oldest friend, which is to say they grew up on the same block and have known each other since before kindergarten, since before everything. Claude is originally from Wisconsin, where they play this great stupid card game—with tens higher than kings, and queens and jacks and all diamonds as trumps, and partnerships that split up and re-form hand by hand—and he has taught them all. They’re hooked on it now, there’s no prying them away from it. They play over here most of the time, so Claude and Laurel can hire a sitter and get away from their kids for a few hours.
    Neal has decided to be the picker this hand and is looking over what he got in the blind, figuring out which four cards he will bury for points. This will take forever. He is an impossibly deliberate player.
    “I can fold out the sofa bed for you guys,” Jesse says to Claude and Laurel. “In case we don’t get to play this hand until morning.”
    “I only play more brilliantly under this kind of pressure,” Neal says. He is a mauerer, meaning he never picks unless he is holding the hand of the century. And now he’s grinning at whatever bonus he got in the blind. Trying to rattle everyone.
    “Are you going to Peg’s shower Tuesday?” Laurel says.
    Jesse rolls her eyes.
    “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. They’re supposed to have a male stripper come and surprise her.”
    “I already got Peggy Palumbo a toaster oven for her first marriage, even though I knew Greg was already sleeping around even before the wedding. Now I’m going to have to shell out for sexy lingerie she can wear on her honeymoon with Rich Coombs, who you just know has long yellow toenails and pee stains on his Jockey shorts. Peg doesn’t have to wear black lace to get him turned on. All she has to do is show up. Actually, she could probably just phone in.”
    “Sometimes I’m sorry I couldn’t have been born a woman,” Neal says, not looking up from his hand, “and instead of sports talk and sexual bragging, I could have deep, sensitive conversations with my girlfriends.”
    “Yeah,” Claude says. “Bonding conversations.”
     
    It was Laurel who fixed up Jesse and Neal in the first place. He is Laurel’s cousin. Jesse didn’t know him in high school. He grew up in Haney’s Corners, came to New Jerusalem to take on the cave, which his family had started him off with instead of one of their carnivals—hotbeds of trouble.
    The three of them, Laurel and Jesse and Neal, went together over to Ted Gates’s Wound Day party. Before he came to work at the Texaco station, Ted had quit high school and signed up with the army and got shipped to Vietnam for about ten minutes, one of which was an extremely bad minute of getting shot in fifteen or so places. To commemorate this tiny piece of stopped time, he would celebrate every year by laying in several pony kegs, pinning his Purple Heart to his T-shirt, and letting anyone who wanted see his scars. “For free.”
    Jesse liked Neal straightaway. She was practically sold on him by the time they left the party. They’d spent most of it talking, drinking paper cups of foamy beer, sitting side by side on a rusty swing set left behind by whoever had Ted’s