Duane's Depressed Read Online Free PDF Page A

She didn’t feel up to trying to explain to half the people in town why her husband was walking down the road. Explaining why he was leaving her would be easier: any two people who had been together forty years might one day just elect to say, “Enough!”
    Karla blazed on past the post office, to the considerable disappointment of several people who had been hoping to ask hera few questions—discreet questions, of course. When and if it came to a showdown of some kind between herself and Duane, she was not really sure that the good citizens of Thalia would come down on her side. Duane was outrageously popular, always had been. He was president of the school board at the time, and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. Karla, by her own admission, had had a few years when she could fairly have been described as wild and unruly. Quite a few of the people who had known her then, many of them just as wild, had paid for their wildness and were dead and gone; but some of them were still alive and they had long memories.
    Of course, most of the women in Thalia had always hoped Duane would divorce her, so they could marry him themselves, or at least sleep with him without violating the Seventh Commandment—or whichever Commandment it was that forbade adultery. The fact that most of these women were now long in the tooth didn’t mean that they had entirely abandoned these hopes. Even chubby little Earlene, back at the office, had hardly been able to conceal her excitement at the thought that Duane might soon be an eligible divorcé.
    Annoyed as she was by Duane’s sudden bad behavior, Karla’s view of that matter was that the women who allowed themselves to think along those lines were in for a big disappointment. Duane wasn’t by nature much of a womanizer—so far as she knew he hadn’t had a fling in years, and the few that had occurred in earlier days had mainly been forced upon him.
    “You don’t dodge quick enough, Duane—that’s the whole story of you and women,” Karla had told him, years before, when dodging or not dodging had been a constant part of both their lives.
    She started to drive out the road toward the cabin and have it out with him then and there; all her life she had been a confronter, and this was certainly an issue that needed confronting, but for some reason her instincts had gotten in a scrambled state. It was just possible that something physical had gone wrong with Duane; it might be that what was occurring had nothing to do with any sudden desire for a divorce. He could have had a small stroke, causing Alzheimer’s to come on him sosuddenly that he had forgotten how to drive; he might even have forgotten where they lived. Maybe the divorce theory, which had seemed reasonable at first, wasn’t reasonable at all. Maybe Duane had just had a stroke and lost his mind, in which case she was going to need help when she brought him home. Dickie, their older son, was back in rehab, trying to overcome his cocaine problem, and Jack, the younger boy, was off in the next county, trapping wild pigs, a profession that suited him perfectly. Jack baited horse trailers with acorns and sold whatever pigs he trapped for five dollars a pound to someone who shipped them to Germany or somewhere.
    That left Bobby Lee as the likeliest male who might have some influence with Duane in his deranged state. Karla zipped back to the office and soon had Bobby Lee on the CB.
    “Bobby Lee, what are you doing?” she asked.
    “Oh, not much. I just shot my little toe off,” Bobby Lee said, deadpan as ever.
    “Drop everything then and come to the office,” Karla said. “I need some help with Duane.”
    “What’d he do, beat you up?” Bobby Lee inquired.
    “I’d rather not talk about it on the CB. Could you please just come on to the office?” Karla asked.
    She assumed the part about shooting his toe off was one of Bobby Lee’s little weird jokes, but when his pickup bounced up to the office ten minutes later