Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned back to Marion. “I upchuck if somebody smokes in the car.” She laughed.
    “I know how you feel,” Marion said.
    Grace used the point of one tree to push her glasses up her nose. “Now these,” she said, setting both trees on the counter, “are for you, Mary Anne.”
    “Marion,” Marion said shyly.
    “Out of season,” Grace said, “but what the heck, I made them myself. That’s my business, making Christmas trees. Where’s an outlet? Where’s an outlet?” She picked up one of the trees and hurried over to the stove. “There,” she said, pushing in the plug.
    “Oh, that’s beautiful,” Marion said. The tiny lights shot off a rainbow of colours on the shiny metallic strips the tree was made of. “Dad, look,” she said.
    “Hey, that is nice,” her father said. He came over beside Grace, and Grace put an arm around his waist.
    “Now’s the time to tell you, Bill,” she said, beaming up at him. “Now that you brought me up here for my looks and personality.”
    Her father stood there stiffly, giving her a smile that didn’t make it to his eyes.
    “I’m a rich woman,” she said. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said. “You got a stack of Bibles, I’ll swear on them. These here trees are a gold mine. I got a head office and five branch locations. I’m made of money.”
    Marion is taking it second by second. Will she tell Sam not to come up to the apartment? A second later it’s, Will she let him unpack? While she’s wondering, he goes ahead. In the interval between one second and the next, he moves in.
    One morning she wakes up and they’ve been married two weeks. She can’t believe it. She lives in amazement, perpetually in the first shocking moment. She’s in a kind of torpor, which she and Sam are pretending is the dawn of acceptance. Maybeit is. Before going to sleep on the couch he kisses her lips, and she lets that happen. “I love you,” he says, and she breathes shallowly and thinks, “What if we just go on like this?”
    They never talk about it. If he still wears the dildo, she doesn’t ask. She avoids looking at his crotch. The rest of his body she catches herself looking at for slip-ups, as if the real Sam is somewhere else and this one’s a fake. She looks at him coolly and sometimes with distaste and wonder, saying to herself, “That’s a woman’s shoulder. That’s a woman’s arm.”
    And yet she knows that whoever he is he’s who she loves. She knows that if she didn’t love him, she wouldn’t know who
she
was. He listens to her. He’s the only person who ever has, although until he came along she didn’t know that. Right from the beginning, whenever she was telling him what she thought or felt, she had the very real sensation that the breath of life was entering her, just as if she were a flattened blow-up doll taking shape. After he left the store she always felt lighter and rounder, and a bit cockeyed. She remembers punching the cash-register keys and the tips of her fingers feeling ripe enough to burst.
    Now, all the time, she feels limp, despite the love being there. To her it’s a miracle, her love. It’s like the one thing, the one little tree, that survives the otherwise total devastation of a tornado. She’s going by the restaurant where he works, and she sees him in the window playing the guitar for nobody but the other two waiters (he’s the entertainment when it’s not busy), she sees the narrow curve of his back, and she would still stand between him and a bullet.
    The only person who seems to have any idea that something’s the matter is her friend Emma. Everyone else makes newlywed jokes and asks how the wedding went. Glenda keeps asking when she’s going to have a baby.
    “Never,” Marion says.
    Glenda smiles as if she knows better.
    Emma, on the other hand, says, “Whatever you do, don’t get pregnant.” This is after saying, “You okay? You sure? You look like hell.” One day she goes so far as to say, “A marriage licence