Black and Orange Read Online Free PDF Page A

has all the answers.
    He’d read that sign somewhere before. No, someone else had— the bizarre feeling of displaced déjà vu continued.
    A wall of black and red flannel moved toward them from behind the bar. The Paul Bunyan-looking bartender limped a little from going too fast, at first not noticing them coming in. He put his thick hands down on the counter and tried on a weak smile. “So what can I—?”
    “ Djarums ?” asked Teresa.
    Martin tried to contain his scowl.
    The brown beard vibrated. “ Crackles .”
    “How about something with extra tar?” Martin suggested.
    “I have a few packs of cloves.” The man opened a large cabinet full of cigarette varieties. Teresa eagerly took the black box from him. He slid over a matchbook.
    “Yes, I’m buying them, so don’t ask, Martin.” Teresa tore off the plastic. “Are you going to get on me if I have one?” she asked the bartender.
    “No, ma’am. It’s not a problem. Is it a problem for you Mabel?” His eyes pointed over their shoulders to the vixen.
    Martin turned around. Not turning would make the whole avoidance seem as fake as it really was. He hadn’t been with another woman for more than ten years. Many romantic bonds had been forged before his and Teresa’s and some during as well, but he didn’t like to think about those days anymore. Teresa, on the other hand, must have remembered all of Martin’s other women, from their names down to the shoes they wore. She probably wanted to forget but couldn’t put it out of her mind. Martin just hoped she realized he wasn’t that man anymore.
    “Do you want one, hon ?” Teresa lifted a clove. “They’re quite crackly.”
    “No thank you, ma’am,” the woman named Mabel answered. She had a strange cadence to her voice. It wasn’t a neutral sounding Californian accent, but more of an attempt at it.
    “What are you two drinking?” The bartender folded up his rag.
    “Nothing for me.” Teresa blew out a dragon billow of smoke. She suddenly looked more at ease and more alive. Times like these made Martin think those doctors were full of shit.
    “Dark Heineken?” Martin asked.
    “We have Newcastle.”
    “Sure then.”
    Teresa’s dark cigarette crackled like a sparkler. Shadows moved over the bar like restless ghosts. It didn’t feel right. The bartender pushed over a cold, wet bottle of Newcastle with one hand and an ashtray with the other.
    “You got sandwiches or something to eat?”
    “Only bags of chips,” said the bartender. He halted on the last word, as though chips had been a word he’d had difficulty with at one time, perhaps with a speech impediment.
    Martin wiped a bit of beer off his lip. “We’ll take what you have.”
    Red-gray ash sprinkled into the pewter tray as Teresa gave her clove cigarette three solemn taps. She stared into the rows of bottles. Martin watched her closely. “You going to Mars again?” he asked.
    “Remember the shooting range last week?”
    He finished the beer. Softly burped. “Okay.”
    “When you were filling out the forms the TV was on. There was a commercial.”
    The bartender spotted the empty bottle, pointed at it and Martin hummed an affirmative.
    “I thought it was a commercial for a tampon at first.”
    “I hate those,” Martin admitted, “so much.”
    “But this wasn’t about tampons. There was this woman, actually about your age, who went about her daily routine: she played with her dog, went to the movies with her friends, took in an art gallery, went tanning, laughed at something a handsome guy said to her at a coffee shop—then the commercial narrator reveals the woman has cancer. See, that wasn’t really a tanning bed I saw her in, she was getting radiation therapy.”
    “Teresa—”
    “Hold on. Whatever insurance company or drug company it was—they made it seem like this woman had penciled in her radiation appointment like another entry in her planner, put there between the coffee shop and buying groceries—like