The Black Witch of Mexico Read Online Free PDF Page A

magazine. “She was a little vague.”
    He shrugged and went back to his book. After a while he tossed it across the room, went to the kitchen and poured a couple of fingers of bourbon into a glass with ice. He went up to the roof to stew. He was in the mood for a fight and that wouldn’t be a very good idea.
    He thought again about what Winifred had said to him. “You must keep loving her in a secret place in your heart but you have to let her go.”
    One set of playing cards and she thought she was a relationship counsellor.
    There is nothing you can do about it. It is not part of her destiny or yours for you to be together.
    Destiny was an excuse people made when they gave up.
    There is a darkness gathering around you. If you do not let her go it will swallow you up.
    He paid thirty bucks for that.
    Well, everything was going to work out just fine. He wondered how long he would have to wait before he could go back and show her what a fake she was and get his money back.
     
     
     

Chapter 12
     
    He could never pick the moment that it happened; there was just a slow leeching of the magic, undefinable. She stopped staying over at his apartment on the weekends; she was busy more and more nights during the week, too, taking a new yoga class, or working late when the company took on a new client and she had to stay back to finish a pitch. She never said: “I don’t love you anymore.” She never ever said that.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked her one night, the first time he had ever said those words to a woman. Usually the woman said it to him.
    They had made love without enthusiasm. The pillows were still perfect.She smiled but her eyes were mirrors. “Nothing,” she said.
    He didn’t push it.
    He supposed they had both been working too hard. He talked it over with Jay one day when he was on a break in the lounge.
    “Just let her go,” he said. “She’s playing you. If you walk away and you don’t hear from her again, you know you made the right call. If she calls you up and says “let’s talk about it,” you know there’s still a chance.”
    Was this what she was doing, making a play? Perhaps she had her own exit strategy, same as he did. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, was waiting for him to end it, just as he’d done to a dozen other women before.
    Wasn’t this what he wanted, since that day in the park? So what was wrong with him? He got a sheet of paper and wrote down the pros and the cons of keeping Elena in his life. The pros column filled the whole page. On the other side of the ledger he wrote: Wants Kids, She’s Messy and couldn’t think of anything else.
    The more she withdrew, the more he tried to pick up the slack. For the first time in his life he found himself ringing a woman during the day for no reason; he sent text messages instead of just answering them.
    Sometimes they would go a whole week without seeing each other. She stopped talking about the future. Panicked, he even suggested they go back to Cape Cod for Memorial Day weekend, they could stay at a friend’s beach house, and she smiled and said that might be nice but she would have to check on what her family had planned, she had not seen them in a while and thought they might be doing something.
    This was when he knew. She hated spending holidays with her family because she always got in a fight with one of her brothers and her father always put her down. She never felt good enough around him, and any visit left her seething for days afterwards.
    Now she wanted to spend a whole weekend up there. Okay, no big deal. He would stay cool about this. They would work it out.
     
     
     

Chapter 13
     
    His sister Lynne lived out in Newport, in a white clapboard Victorian. She was a teacher but these days she stayed home and looked after her two little boys. Her husband, Denny, was a nurse over at Newton-Wellesley.
    The front yard was the usual disaster. There were a couple of overturned bikes, a thick wedge of envelopes and