Say When Read Online Free PDF Page B

to tell Zoe. She knows something’s up.”
    “What do you mean? What happened?”
    “Come on, Ellen. She just knows something—nothing definite. She can sense it. Kids always can.”
    Ellen sat quietly for a moment, then said, “Oh, I’m so sorry about this, Griffin. If I could make myself feel differently, I would. But I can’t help it. I feel…like another person with Peter. Alive, you know?”
    “Meaning you felt dead with me.” He laughed. “Is that it?”
    She said nothing.
    “Is that it, Ellen?”
    “No. No, that’s not…” She reached across the table, touched his hand. “I didn’t feel dead with you, I just…” She leaned back in her chair. “Griffin. I’m going to turn forty years old and I have never…Look, I never believed in romantic love. Not for me, anyway. I never felt it. I wanted it, though. I’d watch all those sappy movies and feel this incredible yearning. …I didn’t think I’d ever get to feel those things inside myself. But when I met Peter, there was this instant—”
    “Zoe wanted to sleep in the bathtub.”
    “What are you talking about? Why won’t you just let me try to explain—”
    “Frankly, I am not interested, Ellen. I could not care less about you and your greasy paramour. I told you, just do what you have to do. I don’t want to hear about it. What matters to me is Zoe. We have to tell her why things around here are going to change. And they are, Ellen. For one thing, I’m going to be going out, too.”
    She frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I’m going out, too. We’ll alternate nights. If you think I’m going to baby-sit every night while you live out your soap opera, you’re crazy. But we have a job to do together, and that is Zoe. She gets to have a mother, and she gets to have a father. I’m not leaving; I’m not going to move into some sterile apartment with dime-store silverware and cardboard-box end tables so that you can be conveniently rid of me. I am Zoe’s father, and I won’t be relegated to seeing her on fucking weekends, Ellen. I will stay in her life, every day, and I will stay out of yours. Aside from Zoe, anything we do from now on is our own business, and not each other’s. You want to be divorced? Fine, presto! we’re divorced. It is done—right here, right now, because I say so. All the rest of the stuff is a formality that we will get to in time.” He stood up.
    “Griffin, sit down. I want to talk to you.”
    “I’ll tell you something, Ellen. I’m getting a little bored hearing about what you want. And I’m tired. I’m going to bed. You don’t tell me what to do anymore: That’s the first thing. You don’t ask me for anything. And we will both talk to Zoe in the morning.” He turned to leave the room.
    “Wait a minute!” She stood up, grabbed his arm. “You can’t just leave like this, goddamnit! We have to have some plan.”
    Griffin frowned. “I just told you the plan. If you don’t like it…” He didn’t bother to finish. He went upstairs, flung back the covers angrily, and got into bed. He heard Ellen come upstairs, rummage around in the linen closet, then go back downstairs. “Fine,” he said aloud. “Good.” And then quietly, experimentally, “Bitch.” The word echoed inside him, a mournful reverberation that emanated from behind his breastbone and would not stop.
     
    Hours later, he was still awake. He’d felt, standing over Ellen at the kitchen table, that he finally had things under control. That, now that the shock of first hearing the news had passed, he was actually relieved at the prospect of getting rid of her—even at moments of extreme adoration, he’d realized she was a royal pain in the ass. Oh, yes, he’d realized that. Ellen took the concept of “high-maintenance woman” to another level entirely. He wanted a low-maintenance woman, one who would sit and watch a Bears game with him and drink real beer and realize that sex was about giving as well as taking. Ellen