Family and Other Accidents Read Online Free PDF

He showers, gets dressed, and takes the keys to the Sentra from the hook in the laundry room. Maybe he’s going to drive twenty minutes to Jenny’s and apologize, or maybe he’s going to the twenty-four-hour market for bagels and soup so there’s food in the house. Maybe he’ll only make it to the end of the cul-de-sac. It all depends how much gas is in the tank, if they’ve plowed the roads, and how badly things go when he gets behind the wheel.

cold without
snow
    Jack asks Mona to move in the day the Ronco food dehydrator arrives in the mail. It makes sense—she sleeps over four or five nights a week, she’s been dropping hints about her lease expiring for months, and her panties are overrunning his sock drawer. Then there’s the disturbing discovery he made last fall when his brother left for college: Jack doesn’t like being alone. The nights Mona doesn’t stay, he can’t sleep in the echoey house that had belonged to his parents, so he watches infomercials into obscene hours of the morning, showing up at the firm the next day with eggplant blotches under his eyes. The moment of clarity comes when he opens the food dehydrator box, the first of five $19.95 installments already charged to his American Express card, and looks absently at the machine in his kitchen where nothing but coffee was made even before his mother dropped dead three years ago. No good is coming from solitude.
    So the weekend before Christmas Jack rents a cargo van to move Mona’s clothes and books and CDs; they leave behind the semi-disposable furniture from Value City she got when she started at the
Plain Dealer
after college. While she’s loading boxes, Mona’s tennis shoes slide on water frozen in the gutters. Her fat red ponytail bouncing behind her, she’s just so clean, like girls in douche commercials. And Jack feels good about her move-in until she suggests they get a Christmas tree while they have the van.
    â€œI’m not really a tree kind of guy,” Jack says. “I’m more of a pretending-to-be-Jewish kind of guy.”
    â€œAre you serious?”
    â€œI’m an attorney, I live in Beachwood.” Jack smiles. “I’ve been getting Hanukkah cards from my neighbors for years.”
    Amber eyes wide, Mona looks bewildered and adorable, much younger than twenty three, and he feels obliged to say more even though he has already explained that major holidays for him usually involve exchanging unwrapped gifts with his brother over Chinese takeout.
    â€œI’m not Scrooge,” Jack sighs. “It’s just bad timing; we’ve got work and my brother’s in town.”
    â€œI know, I’m sorry.” Mona apologizes because she apologizes for everything—the horrible alarm clock gong on mornings she has to wake up first, traffic jams on 271, paper cuts he gets at work. “But it hasn’t snowed, and there’s no tree, so it doesn’t really feel like Christmas to me yet.”
    Jack shakes his head; that drummer boy song is playing on the radio for the nine-billionth time, and every store window in the greater Cleveland area has a frosting of spray-can snow.
    â€œWe’ll be at your parents’ house in a few days.” He puts his hand on the knee of her jeans. “Won’t they have a tree?”
    â€œMy parents have a great tree.” Mona lays an always-cold hand on top of his. “But, I don’t know, I thought it might be nice to have one of our own.”
    Suddenly Jack has a weird vision of what might happen if he let the van drift into the crowded right lane of the highway. It’s so clear he can hear the glass and metal bust up all around Mona.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Two days later he’s trying to push her off a balcony. His hands on her pale throat, her eyes wide and confused. Even as it happens, Jack is pretty sure it’s a dream—he’s not crazy about