Family Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

be some kind of woodpecker, or even a dog, but make sure it’s a
white
dog, a whippet or a greyhound, something exotic, something to transform the moment.”
    “Is this what they teach you in therapy? To lie?”
    “It’s not lying, it’s when you have to change thesubject, dispel a bad mood. A little fib can be alluring, it can heighten the moment just when you’re bottoming out.”
    “Look, let’s not talk about it. I hate to go there anyway, and you’re making me a nervous wreck. I just want to see my brother.”
    “He’ll live. Everyone has to be divorced at least once. It’s a rite of passage.”
    “He’s different, he takes it personally,” she said. They laughed, then they tried to stop laughing.
    Celeste was going on a small trip with her father. He took her for a week every summer to his parents’ house on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a peculiar life, Margaret thought, to always pack suitcases for her child. Each time it was difficult to let go of Celeste. She folded the little T-shirts, rolled the socks, shook out the ruffled bathing suit to see it, a velvety hot pink. Her daughter looked lovely in it, sweet, like ribbon candy. She packed the suitcase with Celeste’s favorite things—her velour beach towel, her sockmonkey doll, and two new girl-detective mystery books that Celeste had asked for.
    Tracy needed the car to drive back and forth between the mall and the 20th Century Diner, so Margaret was taking the train to Wilmington. The morning of her trip she woke to find the kitchen floor covered with grit. The windows were open a few inches and ash from the nearby power plant had collected on the sill, sifting out across the floor. It was soot from the stack at Narragansett Electric, much worse since the plant had switched back to coal during the oil crisis. The soot crackled when she walked over it, bursting into dark blots on the linoleum. She couldn’t just leave it there. She wet a dishtowel at the sink. She pushed the cloth over the floor, but it left dark smears.
    “I need this filth. I really need it!” she told Tracy when he came through. He walked over to her with a broom. Tracy swept the broom over Margaret’s hips, pushing her skirt high. He pulled the broom down her thighs, and returned to her waist. He toed her firmly with his shoe, tipped her off-balance until she lay curved on her side against the linoleum. He kept his foot weighted on her hip and stroked the broom over her.
    “Will you stop this?” she said.
    “I can’t,” Tracy said.
    “You can. You can if you want. Do you want to stop?”
    Tracy was sweeping her underwear down. He was kneeling behind her. He pressed the heel of his hand against her spine and fucked her. She began to doubt if she had lived a previous life. The girl at the stake was probably just a commercial artist’s rendition of a popular theme: a girl’s innocence going up in smoke.
    “Let me go. I’ll miss the train,” she told him.
    “Just don’t think of it. Jesus, don’t think of it now.”
    “I’m late—” Her voice sounded small, out of range. In a moment, he let her stand up. She tugged her panties up over her knees, adjusted the waistband of her skirt, and smoothed her hips. Her clothes were spotted with soot. “Shit, Tracy.”
    Tracy said, “I’ll be in Wilmington tomorrow.”
    “Oh no, you don’t. Cam needs to talk,” she told him.
    “Talk all you want. Give it a big chew. You have twenty-four hours, that’s plenty of time. Isn’t that plenty of time?”
    She couldn’t answer him. Her words would be deflectedno matter what she said. “It doesn’t matter,” she told him. She took her case and went down to the street. He trailed her out of the building.
    “You and Cam talk all you want,” he said. “Just rest assured, Margaret, I’ll be cutting in on your bull session.”
II
    When the train reached New Jersey, she decided that Tracy’s behavior that morning was just childish jealousy. She was approaching her home