JM03 - Red Cat Read Online Free PDF

again, and shook his head. “Never heard of her.” He dug his hands into his coat pockets and seemed to shiver. The waitress came and David ordered orange juice and nothing else.

    “How about Jill Nolan?” I asked.

    “Not her either,” he said softly.

    He was turned out in pinstriped navy, crisp and spotless despite the messy sidewalks. But David also looked smaller today, and older and more distracted too.

    “Is this Nolan going to tell her pal about your call?” he asked.

    “Maybe,” I said. “Probably. And I don’t expect it will take Holly long to figure out what it was about.”

    “That’s fucking great,” David said. “What happened to discretion?”

    “You think she’ll be surprised that you’re looking for her? It’s not like she ordered you not to try to find her, after all. Hell, she might even be flattered. Maybe it’ll make her get in touch.”

    “Fucking great,” he said again. David’s juice came, but he just looked at it for a while and went back to peering out the window. He looked east and west and east again, searching for something along the length of Seventeenth Street.

    “Has she called again?” I asked.

    David snorted. “Don’t you think I would’ve mentioned it?”

    I was by no means certain, but I nodded anyway. “Did something else happen, then?”

    He stiffened and shook his head slowly. “What the hell are you going on about?”

    “You seem a little jumpy.”

    David stared at me for a long moment, his eyes feverish in his waxen face. “Don’t think you know something about me now, because you don’t,” he said. He tugged at a tiny scrap of skin over his Adam’s apple, a nervous habit he’d had since he was a kid but that I hadn’t seen in years. And I thought of something I hadn’t thought of for at least as long.

    I couldn’t have been much older than ten, which made David maybe twelve. It was springtime, I remembered, because the French doors were opened onto the terrace, and a table was set outside with our parents’ breakfast on it, though no one was eating. And I remembered it was a weekday, because Irma, the woman who took care of us back then, was orbiting raggedly around Lauren and me, trying to get us ready for school. But her efforts were in vain that morning; we were even less cooperative than usual, distracted as we were by the tension congealing around us, and the dangerous hum in the air.

    It was what happened when the usually simmering border war between our parents heated up to something more overt. We never knew the substance of their conflict, or the particulars that brought things to a boil, but we knew more or less what to expect: lowered voices, raspy whispers, quick footsteps and slamming doors, and a thick, oppressive silence in between. Familiar, but frightening nonetheless.

    We hadn’t seen our mother, but only heard her voice in jagged fragments. Our father had made a brief appearance, unshaven and still in his striped pajamas and robe— he’d given up going to the Klein & Sons offices years before. He breezed through the kitchen with a bottle of seltzer under his arm and ruffled his hand through my hair. His smile was lopsided and his eyes were unfocused. He breezed off again, in the direction of the bedrooms, and I followed at a distance. I found David outside the double doors to their room, his ear cocked. He turned away as I approached.

    “What are they saying?” I whispered. He didn’t answer. “Can you hear?” Again, nothing. I stepped up to the door, to listen myself, and I saw David’s face— the tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. It was the first time I remember seeing him cry.

    “What the fuck are you looking at?” he snapped.

    “Nothing.”

    “Then get out of here.”

    “Can you hear?” I asked again. “What are they talking about?”

    David wheeled and wiped his arm across his face and shoved me in the chest. “You, you little faggot— they’re talking about what a fucking