The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore Read Online Free PDF Page A

going to have to let them go now," the man said. "You are the last ones to see these little
bebés
." He took them over to the water's edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. That's when a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them, one by one, from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.
    Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else's lust. His every posture contained a strut.
    "I think I need a drink," she said. The kids were swimming.
    "Don't expect me to buy you a drink," he said.
    Had she even asked him to? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passers-by? Who told you
that
?
     
    when they finally left La Caribe, she was glad. Staying there, she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro, she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But, for now, she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who, as he aged stoically and carried on in bottomless forgetting, would come to scarcely recall—was it even past imagining?—that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.

----
The Juniper Tree
    the night robin ross was dying in the hospital, I was waiting for a man to come pick me up—a man she had once dated, months before I began to—and he was late and I was wondering whether his going to see her with me was even wise. Perhaps I should go alone. Our colleague ZJ had called that morning and said, "Things are bad. When she leaves the hospital, she's not going home."
    "I'll go see her tonight," I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I would make it so. It was less like integrity, perhaps, and more like magic.
    "That's a good idea," ZJ said. He was chairman of the theatre department and had taken charge, like a husband, since Robin had asked him to. His tearfulness about her fate had already diminished. In the eighties, he had lost a boyfriend to aids, and now all the legal and medical decision-making these last few months, he said, seemed numbly familiar.
    But then I found myself waiting, and soon it was seven-thirty and then eight and I imagined Robin was tired and sleeping in her metal hospital bed and would have more energy in the morning. When the man I was waiting for came, I said, "You know? It's so late. Maybe I should visit Robin in the morning, when she'll have more energy and be more awake. The tumor presses on the skull, poor girl, and makes her groggy."
    "Whatever you think is best," said the man. When I told him what ZJ had said, that when Robin left the hospital she wasn't going home, the man looked puzzled. "Where is she going to go?" He hadn't dated Robin very long, only a few weeks, and had never really understood her. "Her garage was a pig sty," he once said. "I couldn't believe all the crap that was in it." And I had nodded agreeably, feeling I had won him; my own garage wasn't that great, but whatever. I had triumphed over others by dint of some unknowable charm. Now I was coming to realize that a lot of people baffled this guy, and that I would be next to become incomprehensible and unattractive. That is how dating among straight middle-aged women seemed to go in this college town: one available man every year or so just made the rounds of us all. "I can share. I'm good at sharing," Robin used to