The Love Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

something she didn’t want to say.
    — I did see her bow her head, said Blondie, after a moment. — I thought it was after she saw my sunflowers out back. You know what a mess they are.
    Lan had looked down at her feet, her eyebrows a little raised; she had stared at her big toes through her stockings, as if looking to them for advice or friendship. Then she had very slightly shifted her weight. I heard a squeak, and saw how new her high heels were, how synthetic, how cheaply made. They dug into her feet. I saw how she rocked back onto her heels, inching the balls of her feet up the ramps, out from under the front straps. It was a movement I’d seen many women make over the years, without seeing it. The female equivalent of loosening a tie. But never had I seen an instep as swollen as hers, nor welts so lurid. Her heels hung over the backs of the lasts; those shoes were too small. Maybe her feet had swollen up on the plane. That was possible. Still, Blondie would never have worn shoes like that. Today she was, in fact, wearing semi-orthopedic Danish clogs. When she walked she clopped.
    Blondie would have rightly complained about how her feet hurt. Lan simply gazed, meditative, upon hers.

 
    2
    Beam Me Out

    CARNEGIE /  Lan. Of course we have started the story with Lan, on whose account so much eventually came to pass. But I hereby restart it to begin two years earlier, when my mother was still alive; for in the beginning, believe me, was Mama Wong.
    Is this not allowed? Never mind.
    We will return to Miss Fine Spine soon enough, never fear.
     
    How soberly exhilarating the first four or five years of my mother’s stay at the Evergreen Overlook Assisted Living Residence Home! Other residents of the Alzheimer’s unit came and went; only Mama Wong survived, survived. For the next couple of years too we remained guiltily proud. She was beating the odds. She was outliving other people. She was proving, as she would have liked, a winner.
    Such victory was expensive. I could not help but note, by the seventh year or so, that it cost $4,500 a month and was not covered by insurance; also that one could not say so. One was not permitted to recall that Mama Wong, then eighty-three, used to boast how in her family women often lived to be a hundred. That would be unfeeling.
    — How often does she even recognize me? I said all the same, revealing my inner beast one fine suburban morning.
    — But the times it does happen, said Blondie immediately. The times she’s there.
    Blondie held her hand to her belly as she spoke; she was then, at forty-three, to our most profound confoundment, pregnant. Before her thrashed the pygmy goat, its head stuck in a watering can. I was not too clear about the name of the goat; only that it belonged to Blondie’s dear friend Gabriela, who had suffered a fencing failure such as had led to the destruction of her garden by deer. This had in turn led to her allowing a hunter on to her land, a man who shot with a bow and arrow, and dressed like a tree. He had donated the meat to a shelter. Nevertheless, Gabriela had been forced to recuperate in Italy.
    This was how her goat had come to live (illegally) on our nice suburban property, where he butted our children and nibbled on their ice skates. He denuded our kousa dogwood. He made a mockery of our lawn.
    His one charm: he could hold his ears out straight to either side, like a parody of a crucifixion.
    Still Blondie doted on the creature because he belonged to Gabriela, and because he evoked, lucky quadraped, her sacred family-farm past.
    — The goat butted Wendy again today, I said. She fell and knocked a tooth out.
    Blondie absently left the goat to thrash, its balloon belly, like hers, heaving. The clanging of the watering can was loud.
    — Was she upset? she asked.
    — She ran off crying about how she was just glad she didn’t live on a farm.
    — And you said?
    — I said she was right, she should be sure to remember this moment and