My Husband's Sweethearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked so great in eyeliner.
Basically, I'd planned on avoiding death."
    "Ah, cheating death. Now that is part of your pattern."
    "Let's not start in with that so fast, okay?" His voice is
tired. He is dying, after all. The exhaustion comes on
quick. It's a quiet moment. I don't have anything else to
say. And then he adds, "My heart's turned on me. I
thought you'd appreciate the irony of me having a bad
heart."
    I don't say anything. My damn eyes well up with tears.
I let them tour the bedroom like it's a gift shop. As I pick
up curios and perfume bottles off the dresser, I inspect
them absentmindedly. They're mine but they feel like
someone else's things, someone else's life.
    "You used to think I was funny," he says.
    "You used to be funny."
    "You should laugh at a dying man's jokes. It's only
polite."
    "I'm not interested in polite," I say.
    "What are you interested in?"
    What was I interested in? I look at the shoes I'm wearing.
I paid too much for them. I can feel them fading out
of fashion in this very instant. I am here, in these shoes,
standing in my bedroom because my mother told me to
come home. That's not all this is. I'm not simply a dutiful
daughter who doesn't know what to do and so does what
she's told. But I am a daughter—my father's daughter, the
father who left my mother and me for another woman. I
swore I'd never repeat my mother's mistakes, but hadn't
I? Artie, the older man. Artie, the cheat. How could I
have known he would cheat on me? Was I drawn to him
subconsciously because I knew that he would? Did my
subconscious dupe me? Did it force me to marry my
father? Am I just playing out some twisted Freudian
scene—now I'm required to play out my father's death?
Required to tend to Artie?
    "Do you have a round-the-clock nurse?" I ask.
    "It makes me feel better to have someone else in the
house. They don't stay all night. Marie is here now and
she'll give one last call—like at a bar. Insurance doesn't
cover it all, but now that you're here . . ."
    "We'll keep the nurse," I tell him. "I'll be sleeping in
the guest bedroom downstairs."
    "You could play nurse," he says with this playfully sad
expression. Irrepressible. My heart feels full, like there is a
tide within me, and I steady myself with one hand on my
bureau. This is Artie, the man I love, in spite of reason.
I'm here because I love him—arrogant, cheating, busted-hearted
Artie.
    I can't quite look at him. I manage to focus on the bedside
table. It's overrun with pill bottles. Artie is dying. I'm
going to be the one to hand him over to the mortician, to
death. Alone. Regardless of those other women in their
other lives, I'm his wife, and this strikes me, suddenly, as
hugely unfair.
    "I'd like to know where they all are now, Artie. Where
are they?"
    "Who?"
    "Your other women. They were there for the good
times," I say. "Where are they now?" I sit down on a chair
next to the bed. I really look at Artie—our eyes meeting
for the first time. His blue eyes are watery, darker because
of it. "Am I supposed to go this alone?"
    " Are you going to go this?" he asks.
    "All I'm saying is that it doesn't seem right that I
should have to. I didn't say whether I was going to or not."
    He reaches out and tries to touch my face. No, no, Artie Shoreman. Not so fast. I jerk my head away, then
stand up and begin to pace the room. I can feel him watch
me pick up a photo of the two of us on the back of a ferryboat
to Martha's Vineyard. Suddenly I remember holding
hands as we toured the gingerbread-looking houses in
Oak Bluffs, gazing out over the cliffs at Gay Head, and
Artie praying for our future together, blessed by abundant
blubber, at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. I look
at his arms around me in the picture, and I remember that
exact moment—how warm he felt against me, how cold the
wind was on my arms, and the little, wizened old granny
who snapped the shot for us and smiled that old patronizing