Robert B. Parker Read Online Free PDF Page B

honked the horn on their car in shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm.
    Jennifer said, “I think there’s something wrong with him.” Her lipstick looked slightly smudged and her mouth had that slightly red look around it that it always got when she’d been doing a lot of kissing.
    “Bruce? Why do you think there’s something wrong with him?” I wasn’t drunk yet, but I would be in a while.
    “He’s so aggressive,” she said. “It’s not natural. He’s grabbing and, you know, shunting and … he tried to put my hand on it and he’s …” She shook her head. “He’s sick.”
    There was a tree down and we leaned our backs against it and drank our beer. The lake glistened through the trees. The sounds of the party off to our left. In the trees around us the movement of squirrels and birds. “My love,” I said, “Bruce isn’t sick, he’s horny. He’s normal. All guys are like that. Some of them just inhibit it more, you know?” We were side by side against the tree, our feet pointed out before us, Jennifer’s loafers exactly side by side, toes straight.
    “I know, I mean I expect guys to try. I don’t blame them for trying, but he’s so … so persistent and he getsso excited. In him it’s not affection. It’s his needs and it doesn’t take account of what I want.” Jennifer didn’t know the dates of the Civil War. But she knew what she needed to know. Maybe better than I did.
    “You want to stay with me?” I said. She nodded.
    I worked that summer loading trucks in a Coca-Cola plant out on Kempton Street in New Bedford. Every day from ten in the morning till seven at night I took cases off the roller track and heaved them into a truck. The top of the truck always had broken glass on it and when you loaded tops and shoved the cases across you usually scraped your forearms. I had cuts on both arms all summer. One weekend I borrowed a car and went up to Marblehead and visited Jennifer. Sarah Vaughan was singing at a club in Magnolia and we went down in the warm evening, just she and I. Her friend couldn’t go and it was almost like a date. I had on my summer dress-up—white linen jacket, white oxford-weave shirt, button-down collar, black knit tie, gray slacks, loafers, no socks. Jennifer had on a full skirt and a peasant blouse. She sat easily and poised in the front seat with me and talked as we drove north through Salem and Beverly. Settling darkness, people still out, a lot of them on front steps, the radio on. Vaughn Monroe, “Dance Ballerina Dance,” Larry Clinton, Bea Wain, “Deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls.” “She’s married to André Baruch,” I said. Jennifer was never aware peripherally. Her alertness was always concentrated on one thing. “Bea Wain,” I said. “The girl singing. She’s married to an announcer named André Baruch who sounds sort of like Basil Rathbone and didplay-by-play on the Dodgers for a little while.” Jennifer smiled. It was as if I’d explained E=mc 2 . The road curved, nearly empty, along the seacoast and the summer trees were deep green and placid.

CHAPTER NINE
    Jennifer said she loved Nick. She loved everyone she went steady with.
    “That’s not love,” I would say, “that’s convenience. You can’t be in love with two or three people a year.”
    And she would smile that aching smile and say I could love my way and she could love her way. “What fun would it be,” she would say, “to go out with someone without being in love?”
    “You got it backwards,” I would say, and she would nod and think on it, but I always had a sense that she wouldn’t be different because I said she should be.
    I was in Onie’s with Billy Murphy and Guze drinking beer on a December night when she called me.
    “Come and get me,” she said. “I need you to come and get me.”
    “Where?”
    “Student Union.”
    “I’ll be up.”
    I borrowed Dave Herman’s Chrysler convertible anddrove up rubbing the frost off the inside of the