The Last Thing He Wanted Read Online Free PDF

Ward, yes.
    It was true that Ward used to sell pharmaceuticals, yes, but no, she would not describe it as dealing dope and no, she did not think there had been any funny business. In any case Ward was beside the point, which was this: her mother was dead.
    Her father’s eyes would go red then, and he would turn away.
    Pretty Kitty, he would say as if to himself. Kit-Cat.
    Half an hour later he would again complain that he had tried to call Kitty a night or two before and the asshole dope dealer she lived with had refused to put her on the line.
    Because he couldn’t, Elena would say again. Because she’s dead.
    Sometimes when the telephone rang in the middle of the night she would wake, and hear the front door close and a car engine turning over, her father’s ’72 Cadillac Seville convertible, parked on the spiky grass outside the room in which she slept. The headlights would sweep the ceiling of the room as he backed out onto the street. Most nights she would get up and open a bottle of beer and sit in bed drinking it until she fell asleep again, but one night the beer did not work and she was still awake, standing barefoot in the kitchen watching a local telethon on which a West Palm Beach resident in a sequined dress seemed to be singing gospel, when her father came in at dawn.
    What the hell, her father said.
    I said to Satan get thee behind me, the woman in the sequined dress was singing on the television screen.
    You shouldn’t be driving, Elena said.
    Victory today is mine.
    Right, I should take out my teeth and go to the nursing home, he said. Jesus Christ, you want to kill me too?
    The woman in the sequined dress snapped her mike cord as she segued into “After You’ve Been There Ten Thousand Years,” and Dick McMahon transferred his flickering rage to the television screen. I been there ten thousand years I still won’t want to see you, honey, he shouted at the woman in the sequined dress. Because honey you are worthless, you are worse than worthless, you are trash. By the time he refocused on Elena he had softened, or forgotten. How about a drink, he said.
    She got him a drink.
    If you have any interest in what I’m doing, he said as she sat down at the table across from him, all I can say is it’s major.
    She said nothing. She had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what her father was doing. This had been difficult only when she had to fill out a form that asked for Father’s Occupation. He did deals. Does deals? No. She had usually settled on Investor. If it came up in conversation she would say that her father bought and sold things, leaving open the possibility, in those parts of the country where she had lived until 1982, raw sunbelt cities riding high on land trades, that what he bought and sold was real estate. She had lost her scholarship at the University of Nevada because the administration had changed the basis for granting aid from merit to need and she had recognized that it would be a waste of time to ask her father to fill out a financial report.
    Right from the top, he said. Top shelf.
    She said nothing.
    This one turns out the way it’s supposed to turn out, he said, I’ll be in a position to deal myself out, fold my hand, take the Kitty Rex down past Largo and stay there. Some life. Catching fish and bumming around the shallows. Not my original idea of a good time but it beats sitting here getting old.
    Who exactly is running this one, she said carefully.
    What do you care, he said, suddenly wary. What did you ever care who was running any of them.
    I mean, she said, how did whoever is running this one happen to decide to work through you.
    Why wouldn’t they work through me, he said. I still got my teeth. I’m not in the nursing home yet. No thanks to you.
    Dick McMahon had closed his eyes, truculent, and had not woken until she took the glass from his hand and put a cotton blanket over his legs.
    What do you hear from your mother, he had said then.

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