Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t make it easier.”
    “That’s why you come to me. Trying to feel nothing,” she said, taking a small bite of the croissant to make it last. “Like a religion. Nirvana. Except without a god.”
    “Something like that,” I said.
    “Sleep?”
    “I’m down to about fourteen hours a day,” I said.
    “Progress. Like an Atkins diet for depression,” she said. “Lose a little more solitude and isolation each day. Adele, her baby, Flo, Ames, Sally.”
    “And Dave and you,” I finished.
    “All people you care about.”
    I turned my eyes away and shook my head.
    “Things happen. People happen. I’ve been thinking about saving some money and buying a car.”
    “So you can run away again?”
    “Yes.”
    “But you stay and come to me.”
    It wasn’t a question.
    “There’s a lot to be said for it, but depression has its downside,” I said.
    “Why do you like Mildred Pierce so much?” she asked, now working on her coffee. “My husband and I watched it last night.”
    “You like it?”
    “Yes. I have seen it before. What do you like about it?”
    “I don’t know. What do I like about it?”
    “Maybe that bad things happen to Mildred, lots of bad things, but she keeps going. She never gives up.”
    “Her husband leaves her,” I said. “One daughter dies. The other daughter betrays Mildred with her new husband, the husband who…She keeps going.”
    “But you do not.”
    “I do not, but maybe I have to.”
    “Abrupt change of subject,” she said, wiping her hands with the paper napkin. “During the Civil War many people in the North still had slaves. There’s a new book about it.”
    I nodded.
    “On the other hand,” she went on, tossing the crumpled napkin into her half-full wastebasket, “there were many Southerners, prominent Southerners, who fought and even died in the war, who did not believe in slavery and never had any slaves or freed the ones they had before the first shot was fired.”
    “I didn’t know that,” I said. “You going to tell me that I’m a slave to my depression, to my refusal to give up my wife’s death? That I have to take off the shackles and start to live free?”
    She smiled.
    “No,” she said. “I was simply making a reference to something that came to mind, but you’ve done a good job of finding something personal in it.”
    “Maybe I should be a shrink?”
    “God, no. You think you’re depressed now?”
    “You’re not depressed.”
    “I keep busy,” she said. “I have my moments, but I am not chronically depressed. A little occasional depression is normal.”
    She shook her head and went on, “You are beginning to depress me,” she said. “Most of us have suffered terrible losses.”
    “The Cubs have them every year,” I said.
    “Your baseball cap,” she said, pointing at the cap still on my head. “It’s a hopeful sign.”
    “My cap?”
    “You wear it to mask your baldness,” she said. “You have some vanity, some will to feel that others view you with approval.”
    “My head burns if I don’t wear it,” I said.
    “A hat can have more than one function.”
    “You know what the ultraviolet index is?”
    “You mean as a concept or the actual number today?”
    “Today?”
    “You are interested in the present?”
    “I’m interested in my head not turning red and sore,” I said.
    “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, holding up a finger. “I think I heard a touch of irritation in your voice, a very small one, smaller than the birth squeal of a pink baby laboratory mouse, but something. I see hope in that.”
    “The squeal of a pink baby mouse?”
    “Vivid memory of a moment in a biology class in graduate school,” she said. “You know what happened to the mouse? Of course you don’t. One of my classmates took it home and fed it to his pet red corn snake.”
    “You know how to cheer a client up,” I said.
    “I do my best.”
    We went on for a while. We talked about Wilkens and Trasker, about my other client, about my