Mr. Peanut Read Online Free PDF

you go to work this morning?” Sheppard asked.
    “I was going to, but then I didn’t.”
    “Why?”
    “I wanted to see my wife. I had a surprise for her.”
    “And what was that?”
    “A present for her birthday,” Pepin said. “I’d bought us a trip.”
    “To where?”
    “Australia.”
    Sheppard raised his eyebrows. “How long were you going away for?”
    “Indefinitely.”
    “You mean weeks? Months?”
    Pepin shrugged. “I mean we didn’t have a return date.”
    It took all of Sheppard’s willpower at this revelation not to turn around and stare at the one-way glass. “And had you been planning this for a while?”
    “No,” Pepin said, “not exactly.”
    “Well, yes or no?”
    “We’d talked about it last year. Alice mentioned that she’d always wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef. But I hadn’t planned it or anything.
We
hadn’t.”
    “So it was a spur of the moment sort of thing.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s quite a trip for the spur of the moment.”
    Pepin shrugged.
    “It’s not even really a trip,” Sheppard said. “It’s more like a permanent vacation.”
    “We didn’t talk about it like that.”
    “When did you buy the tickets?”
    Pepin sat back, looking away sheepishly. “This morning.”
    For the first time since they’d talked, Sheppard’s gut tingled. “And when was Alice’s birthday?”
    “Next week.”
    “But you had to give her the gift today?”
    “Yes.”
    “Couldn’t contain yourself? Couldn’t wait until she got home?”
    “No.”
    Sheppard considered this. “When were you leaving?”
    “Tonight.”
    Sheppard nodded. He picked up his pencil and tapped it against the table. He could feel his pipe in his jacket pocket and desperately wanted to smoke. “You’ll admit that’s a little strange.”
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “People don’t just walk away from everything like that.”
    “No, not usually.”
    “They have jobs,” Sheppard said. “Family.”
    Pepin shrugged. “We don’t really have an extended family. And I’ve got plenty of money. But like I said, you wouldn’t understand.”
    “Try me.”
    Pepin indicated the ring on Sheppard’s finger. “Have you been married long?”
    Before Sheppard spoke, he considered the question, as if it were anything but straightforward. His entire life, his whole psyche, seemed collapsedinto the state of being married. Even though Marilyn was dead his marriage remained an eternal present, as necessary as a shark’s need to keep swimming, so quantifying it seemed impossible—let alone with a word like
long
. “Yes,” he said.
    “Alice and I had talked about just … leaving. Walking away from everything.” Pepin raised his hands. “From our lives.”
    Sheppard squinted.
    “There was nothing holding us here,” Pepin continued. “Nothing holding us anywhere. No kids. It’s just been us. For thirteen years.”
    “So?”
    “So we’d come to the end of us. Does that make sense?”
    In his mind, Sheppard saw Marilyn again. It was fall and she was wearing her old school sweater and leaning against the patio’s screen, her back to the lake, a cigarette in her hand. He said something to her—he was rocking in his chair when he spoke—and her face darkened, and she threw her ashtray at his head, the glass shattering against the chair back and spraying his cheek. By the time he looked up from his bloody fingers she was already out the door, Sheppard hearing her car start and then the tires peeling, and yet he remained right where he was, listening in the silence that followed to the waves lapping below and feeling his wound dry.
    “Go on.”
    “We needed to do something
new
. Something radical.”
    “Why?”
    “To save us.”
    “From what?”
    “From ourselves,” Pepin said. “So she’d proposed we just leave.”
    “She
did?”
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “Last year.”
    “So why didn’t you leave then?”
    “I guess I didn’t think we needed saving.”
    “But you did