Sweet Jesus Read Online Free PDF

four bathrooms, two ensuites with jacuzzi tubs, a finished basement with a snooker table, and a three-car garage.
    At least my husband’s a good provider, Connie said, almost to herself, as if Mary-Beth wasn’t there.
    That must make you feel safe.
    Well, sometimes it makes me feel like we’re on the right track.
    Though I don’t think the Midas touch ever saved a soul, Mary-Beth said. Harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter.
    Yes, yes, I know, Connie said. It’s moral scrupulousness that ensures the resurrection of the flesh.
    That and a good skin-care regime, Mary-Beth joked. I’m using straight olive oil now. Apparently it’s the new fountain of youth.
    Earlier, Connie said wistfully, the ocean was the colour of olive oil. The sun came out just as it was setting. The clouds were purple and pink and orange. There was a hawk sitting at the top of a tree. Maybe a hundred feet up. White breast with a grey back. Just sitting up there and swivelling its head around. How suddenly the air changes when the sun goes down at this time of year. I felt the chill and melancholy of it. The maples were still wet from the rain and black. Just a handful of yellow leaves hanging from their branches like paper stars. Do you know what they reminded me of?
    I know you’ll tell me, Mary-Beth said, wincing slightly at Connie’s morbid tone.
    The yellow stars the Jews were forced to wear, and Mary-Beth shook her head sorrowfully.
    Connie told her how she’d been to Dachau when she was twelve years old, as a tourist on a family trip to Europe. Her parents had taken her there. She’d held her sister’s hand and they’d walked through the white enamel shower rooms and saw the ovens and watched the black-and-white film footage of rooms piled to the ceiling with glasses, leather shoes, dark wool coats. The piles sloped down from the highest point like grain in a silo, as if poured from above and not accumulatedfrom the floor up. That night, Connie had woken up on the floor of a French hotel scared stiff. She’d seen Nazis under the bed where her parents lay sleeping. They were crouched there with their black stovepipe boots in their hands. Her fear was visceral. It had circled the rug and settled in for good, resting at the centre of things ever since. Connie got so used to her fear she forgot what had caused it in the first place. It was company. She mistook it for truth.
    Sometimes I think you’re half in love with the idea of disaster, Mary-Beth said, but I’m not sure why. Look, she said, suddenly pointing with the remote. They’re doing some kind of follow-up story on that awful incident again.
    Four years ago, a man on a Greyhound bus had stabbed a fellow passenger – a young man asleep with his headphones on. The guy was schizophrenic. He hacked the young man’s head off with a knife and held it up by the hair to taunt the other passengers, who’d all fled the bus and were standing outside on the edge of a dark highway. In the rush to get off, a mother had thrown her toddler over several rows of seats to get her away from him. Then the man on the bus started cutting up his victim’s body with a pair of scissors and eating it.
    I can’t even begin to comprehend, Connie said. How long ago was it that she’d seen that al-Qaeda footage of a hostage on his knees in an orange jumpsuit? A man in a black hood standing above him. A large knife is raised into the air. These televised beheadings, direct from Baghdad, birthplace of the ancient world – such a biblical place. Birthplace of a whole new style of crime.
    The depth of misery, Mary-Beth said, that could drive a person to such a thing.
    Why can’t people learn to control themselves! Connie slapped the empty plates back on the tray and stood up. I mean,people everywhere just seem to be giving into their own worst natures. There’s no restraint. We’re not animals, you know. We can’t just go around doing whatever the frig we