Charming Billy Read Online Free PDF

windshield that asked, Is this trip necessary? Something of the smell of the man’s hair pomade on the back of the seat and the fabric around the window.
    She said, “What will you tell him?” and if you’re looking to blame someone for the lie, then you could as well blame her for putting it just that way: What will you tell him? As if there were options to choose from.
    “I’d like to tell him she’s dead,” he said.
    “She’s dead to me.”
    This was Irish hyperbole, of course. This was the Irish penchant for pursuing any mention of death, any metaphor, any threat, the way a seal goes after a tossed mackerel. Because he’d had no real intention then. No plan. This was just talk.
    “I knew about Tom,” she said, the hometown boy Eva had married. “But I knew she liked Billy, too. She always said how sweet he was. She always talked about his great letters. I never would have believed she’d steal his money.” To make a down payment, she had said, on a gas station on the convent road outside Clonmel.
    He leaned across her lap, across the good wool skirt, the soft cashmere, the still-lovely dregs of her employer’s bottle of Chanel—and pulled at the bone-white handle of the car door. The handkerchief was in her hand, balled in her fist again. The tears starting again.
    “I wish she had died,” Mary said. “It would have been better.” It was the Irish penchant for the word, sure, but also the
fact that she was young enough to think that such talk proved her feelings were profound. “She’s as good as dead to me now.”
    Leaning, he pushed the car door open with his fingertips. He still had one hand on the steering wheel. She put her hand on his arm, the linen handkerchief between them. “Will you call me?” she said.
    He said he would. He kissed her. And then leaned to push the door open again, all the way now, so that it swung out over the sidewalk. So that there was nothing else for her to do but to get out, unassisted, and to walk with her head bent and her handkerchief to her eye, unescorted, back to the building’s service door, where she’d been waiting for him just half an hour before.
    Such rudeness meant something in those days. It’s all ignorance now, but then it was intentional and it meant something to both of them. It meant the end of the thing.
     
    Even climbing the stairs to Billy’s apartment that evening, he had no real plan. He only knew he didn’t want to deliver the blow with Billy’s two sisters and their husbands and Aunt Ellen, his mother, around. Imagine the night: your life’s plans blasted, the baby crying in the next room, your sister and her young husband stirring in their bed, your widowed mother tapping at your bedroom door hour after hour saying, “Are you all right? Would you like a cup of tea?” Saying from behind the closed door, “Billy, there’ll be plenty of other girls, believe me.”
    When Dennis had left Mary in the city that evening, he first went home to Jamaica, where earlier in the day Holtzman had wondered out loud if the little Long Island house had done all right in last night’s storm. He’d grabbed his Dopp kit
and a suit, a pressed shirt and a tie, and then told Holtzman he would drive out there tonight, just to see how the little house had fared.
    Surprised, Holtzman licked his lips and ran a hand down his belly. He was a jowly German with slick hair and earlobes that could have held an entire thumbprint. My mother’s husband .
    “That’s awfully kind of you, Dennis,” Holtzman said slowly, full of hesitation. Wondering, no doubt, if there was a girl involved here, perhaps the very same girl who had called the house that afternoon. Wondering, no doubt, about the miles driven and the wear and tear on the machine and how many more years of accommodating her grown son would have to go into this marriage.
    Dennis’s mother was on the other side of the living room, going through the Sunday papers, smoking. She paused to watch the two of