The Mermaid Chair Read Online Free PDF

infant, I felt the familiar discontent that had been growing in me all winter. It rose with such force it felt as if someone had physically struck me.
    “So,” Kat said. “Are you coming or not?”
    “Yes, I’m coming. Of course I’m coming.”
    As I said the words, I was filled with relief. Not that I would be going home to Egret Island and dealing with this grotesque situation—there was no relief in that, only a great amount of trepidation. No, this remarkable sense of relief was coming, I realized, from the fact I would be going away period.
    I sat on the bed holding the phone, surprised at myself, and ashamed. Because as awful as this situation with Mother was, I was almost glad for it. It was affording me something I hadn’t known until this moment that I desperately wanted: a reason to leave. A good, proper, even noble reason to leave my beautiful pasture.

    C H A P T E R
    Three
    pq
    When I came downstairs, Hugh was making breakfast.
    I heard the hiss of Jimmy Dean sausage before I got to the kitchen.
    “I’m not hungry,” I told him.
    “But you need to eat,” he said. “You’re not going to throw up again. Trust me.”
    Whenever a crisis of any kind appeared, Hugh made these great big breakfasts. He seemed to believe in their power to revive us.
    Before coming downstairs, he’d booked me a one-way ticket to Charleston and arranged to cancel his early-afternoon patients so he could drive me to the airport.
    I sat down at the breakfast bar, pushing certain images out of my head: the meat cleaver, my mother’s finger.
    The refrigerator opened with a soft sucking noise, then closed.
    I watched Hugh crack four eggs. He stood at the stove with a spatula and shuffled them around in a pan. A row of damp brown curls skimmed the top of his collar. I started to say something about his needing a haircut, that he looked like an aging hippie, but I checked myself, or rather the impulse simply died on my tongue.

    22
    s u e m o n k k i d d
    Instead I found myself staring at him. People were always staring at Hugh—in restaurants, theater lines, bookstore aisles. I would catch them stealing glimpses, mostly women. His hair and eyes had that rich autumn coloring that reminds you of cor-nucopias and Indian corn, and he had a beautiful cleft in the center of his chin.
    Once I’d teased him that when we walked into a room together, no one noticed me because he was so much prettier, and he’d felt compelled to tell me that I was beautiful. But the truth was, I couldn’t hold a candle to Hugh. Lately the skin on either side of my eyes had become etched with a fine weave of criss-crossing lines, and I sometimes found myself at the mirror pulling my temples back with my fingers. My hair had been an incredible nutmeg color for as long as I could remember, but it was twined now with a few strands of gray. For the first time, I could feel a hand at the small of my back nudging me toward the mysterious dwelling place of menopausal women. Already my friend Rae had disappeared in there, and she was just forty-five.
    Hugh’s aging seemed more benign, his handsomeness turning ripe, but it wasn’t that so much as the combination of intelli-gence and kindness in his face that drew people. It had captured me back in the beginning.
    I leaned forward onto the bar, the speckled granite cold on the bones of my elbows, remembering how we’d met, needing to remember how it once was. How we were.
    He had showed up at my first so-called art exhibit, which had taken place in a ratty booth I’d rented at the Decatur Flea Market. I’d just graduated from Agnes Scott with a degree in art and inflated ideas about selling my work, becoming a bona fide t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
    23
    artist. No one, however, had really looked at my art boxes all day, except for a woman who kept referring to them as “shadowboxes.”
    Hugh, in the second year of his psychiatric residency at Emory, came to the flea market that day for vegetables. As he