Bag of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

drinking glass after glass of iced tea. I went out to the garage (we were renting a house in Bangor with another couple on as shaky financial ground as we were . . . and no, Jo and I weren’t quite married at that point, although as far as I know, that opal ring never left her finger) and puttered aimlessly, feeling like a guy in a New Yorker cartoon—one of those about funny fellows in the delivery waiting room. As I remember, I fucked up a so-simple-a-child-can-do-it birdhouse kit and almost cut off the index finger of my left hand. Every twenty minutes or so I’d go back inside and peek at Jo. If she noticed, she gave no sign. I took that as hopeful.
    I was sitting on the back stoop, looking up at the stars and smoking, when she came out, sat down beside me, and put her hand on the back of my neck.
    â€œWell?” I said.
    â€œIt’s good,” she said. “Now why don’t you come inside and do me?” And before I could answer, the panties she had been wearing dropped in my lap in a little whisper of nylon.
    *   *   *
    Afterward, lying in bed and eating oranges (a vice we later outgrew), I asked her: “Good as in publishable?”
    â€œWell,” she said, “I don’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but I’ve been reading for pleasure all my life— Curious George was my first love, if you want to know—”
    â€œI don’t.”
    She leaned over and popped an orange segment into my mouth, her breast warm and provocative against my arm. “—and I read this with great pleasure. My prediction is that your career as a reporter for the Derry News is never going to survive its rookie stage. I think I’m going to be a novelist’s wife.”
    Her words thrilled me—actually brought goose-bumps out on my arms. No, she didn’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but if she believed, I believed . . . and belief turned out to be the right course. I got an agent through my old creative-writing teacher (who read my novel and damned it with faint praise, seeing its commercial qualities as a kind of heresy, I think), and the agent sold Being Two to Random House, the first publisher to see it.
    Jo was right about my career as a reporter, as well. I spent four months covering flower shows, drag races, and bean suppers at about a hundred a week before my first check from Random House came in—$27,000, after the agent’s commission had been deducted. I wasn’t in the newsroom long enough to get even that first minor bump in salary, but they had a going-away party for me just the same. At Jack’s Pub, this was, now that I think of it. There was a banner hung over the tables in the back room which said GOOD LUCK MIKE—WRITE ON ! Later, when we got home, Johanna said that if envy was acid, there would have been nothing left of me but my belt-buckle and three teeth.
    Later, in bed with the lights out—the last orange eaten and the last cigarette shared—I said, “No one’s ever going to confuse it with Look Homeward, Angel, are they?” My book, I meant. She knew it, just as she knew I had been fairly depressed by my old creative-writing teacher’s response to Two.
    â€œYou aren’t going to pull a lot of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you?” she asked, getting up on one elbow. “If you are, I wish you’d tell me now, so I can pick up one of those do-it-yourself divorce kits first thing in the morning.”
    I was amused, but also a little hurt. “Did you see that first press release from Random House?” I knew she had. “They’re just about calling me V. C. Andrews with a prick, for God’s sake.”
    â€œWell,” she said, lightly grabbing the object in question, “you do have a prick. As far as what they’re calling you . . . Mike, when I was in third grade, Patty Banning