Denial Read Online Free PDF

loan."
    "Right.  The loan.  A few thousand would tide me over.  I'd have it back to you in a month."
    "You're not eating.  You don't have an appetite?"
    I swallowed another forkful of tuna."
    She glanced at the tomatoes pushed to one side of my salad.  "Why it was so important for you to live in Marblehead escapes me.  I have to tell you:  Two thousand a month sounds like you're paying for an address.  Who needs the aggravation?  Extra stress."  She patted her mouth with her napkin.
    My mortgage was close to five thousand a month.  "No way out of it now," I said.
    "Thank God, Kathy helps out.  You couldn’t live the way you do on what you make."
    My mother had never worked.  I smirked, thinking again about the insurance money she'd inherited from my father.  "Those days are gone, huh?"
    She stopped chewing.  "Meaning?"
    "Meaning you're exactly right.  Kathy and I both have to pitch in."
    "So, anyhow, since I hadn't heard from her, I called her today."
    "You called Kathy?"
    She nodded.  "She told me you're using that cocaine again."
    "She's lying."
    "Why would she lie?"
    "I don't know.  Ask her."
    "So I put two and two together:  the loan and the drugs."
    Without really intending to, I raked the teeth of my fork against the mahogany beside my plate.
    My mother's eyelids fluttered a bit as she watched the fork scratch the high-gloss finish.
    "If you don't want to give me the money, just tell me," I said quietly.  "I'll have to find is somewhere else."  Fast.
    "Your father and I worked hard for our money."
    "It's his life insurance money.  He didn't work for it at all.  He just died."
    She reached over and took the fork out of my hand, the dipped her white cloth napkin in water and tried to polish away the scratches I had made.  Her fingers moved very quickly.  Her cheeks flushed.  "He did the best he could while he was alive."  She stopped, laid my fork on my plate and used a dry corner of her napkin to buff the table to a shine.  The scratches were barely visible.  She took a deep breath and ate another fish square.  "I can give you a few hundred dollars, if that would help."
    I had the desire to drive my fork deep into the mahogany, but I needed all the money I could get.  "Every little bit helps," I smiled.
    "You'll stay for desert, then?"
    "Of course."
    "I know you love rice pudding."
    I detest rice pudding.  "Sounds great," I said.
    She seemed to relax.  "Maybe I could manage three hundred."
     
    *            *            *
     
    Later that night, standing on my deck with a tumbler of scotch, the ocean crashing against the sea wall, I felt more and more uneasy.  Kathy had threatened to leave at least a dozen times during the ten months we'd been living together — over my drugs or my women or my gambling — but it was eleven o'clock, and my gut told me she might stay away this time.
    I had to admit, if she finally called it quits, it would be partly my fault.  You can't expect a woman to stand by you when she doesn't know you.  I'd tried to tell Kathy how different Lynn had been when I was a boy, when the beach was clean, and the leather factories boomed, and people drove ten miles north from Boston to spend the day shopping on Union Street.  But I hadn't told her how watching the city fade into a gray, hobbled shadow of itself had darkened something in me.  I hadn't told her about seeing my father, who wholesaled leather for the J. L. Hanbury Tanning Company, working more and more, making less and less.  I hadn't told her that the most attention the man had ever paid me were clumsy, drunken beatings that twisted pain and pleasure forever in my mind.
    Not that she would have listened for very long.  She had always been quick to dismiss my pain as a lousy excuse for my lifestyle.
    I carried my scotch inside and wandered through the hallways, staring into rooms filled with overstuffed couches, worn leather wing chairs, antique wooden chests, oil paintings of the