Nervous Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

another cigarette and blew a plume of smoke up at the ceiling. “Next several years, Cassie knocked around. San Francisco, then someplace in Colorado, then Key West, back to Frisco, D.C. for a while. She always kept in touch, though, no matter where she was, every Sunday evening, and whenever she was on the East Coast we’d get together. She turned out to be an awful pretty woman. Dressed nice, talked proper. She always was smart. Had a lot of different jobs, I guess, doing I don’t know what. She never said much about what she did. I had the feeling she didn’t think a dumb old lobsterman would understand. But she seemed to have plenty of money. Every year or two she’d be living somewhere new. Never got married, but a couple years ago she took up with a feller down there in your neck of the woods, ended up moving in with him, told me she thought she might marry him.” He hesitated, then laughed softly. “Grannie, she called him. Don’t know where that came from. Anyway, she still called me every Sunday evening, and maybe once every couple months we’d get together, meet in Portsmouth, have dinner, get caught up. I never met this man, Grannie, but I liked him from the way Cassie talked about him. He was teaching English at some college in Boston. She said he treated her good. I kept telling her, one day you ought to bring your Grannie along so I could meet him. She’d say, sure, we’ll do that sometime.” He stopped, looked out the window, and blinked several times.
    â€œUncle Moze—”
    â€œNo, sorry.” He coughed into his fist. “Anyway, next thing I know she tells me she’s going to get married. But no, it ain’t that Grannie who I never got to meet. It’s some dentist twenty-five years older’n her, she says, with grown-up kids, whose wife died a few years before, lives in Madison, there, outside of Boston, who she never even mentioned to me before. I know what I should’ve said. I should’ve told her, ‘That’s great, honey, congratulations, you found a man you love, who loves you.’ But instead, what comes out of my mouth? I say, ‘What the hell, Cassie? You’re going to marry some horny widower old enough to be your father? A goddamn dentist with grown kids? What’s wrong with that nice English teacher, that Grannie feller? Ain’t he rich enough for you?’ ” He shrugged. “She hung up on me. Don’t blame her. You want another beer?”
    I nodded. “Sure.”
    Moze groaned, pushed himself to his feet, picked up our empty beer cans, and shambled into the kitchen. For the first time all day he looked his age, which I figured was about seventy-five.
    He was back a minute later. “Here you go, sonnyboy.” He handed me another Budweiser and sat on the sofa. “Where the hell was I?”
    â€œThe goddamn dentist,” I said “Cassie hanging up on you.”
    â€œRight.” He smiled quickly. “That was a year and a half ago, Brady. It was in the winter, I remember.” He took a slug of beer. “I ain’t heard a word from her since.”
    â€œA year and a half?”
    â€œAyup.”
    â€œJust like that? No warning? No explanation?”
    â€œJust like that.” He shook his head. “I should never’ve spoken my mind about her marrying the damned dentist. Made her mad. S’pose I can understand that. And it appears she just kept on being mad. Cassie always was a damned pigheaded woman.”
    â€œIt runs in the family,” I said.
    He smiled.
    â€œYou tried calling her, didn’t you?”
    He nodded. “Oh, hell yes. Not at first. Like you say, I can be pigheaded, too. At first I was mad that she didn’t call. It’s okay to be upset for a little while. But hell. This is her old daddy. You ain’t supposed to hold grudges with your daddy. So I figured I’d just wait her out. But after a while I