The Most Fun We Ever Had Read Online Free PDF Page A

efficiently all the way to the Supreme Court.
    She slit the envelope with the knife and pulled out the paper. She read it quickly, with trained eyes, and she dropped it into the garbage. The chardonnay was shitty gas station wine called Hodnapp’s Harvest. Though the labels on the backs of trendier and more whimsical wines might say something like PAIRS WELL WITH DELICATE GRILLED FISH AND SPRING RISOTTO —none of the labels ever mentioned complementing string cheese, she noted—this one featured a photo of what was apparently the Hodnapp family crest. She squinted to read the calligraphic inscription below the surname:

    THIS WINE PAIRS WELL WITH FRIENDSHIP .
    She poured a third of the bottle into a coffee mug and went by herself onto the balcony to mourn her future.
----
    —
    L iza had gotten lucky, she supposed, nearing her house, psyching herself up. Wendy had paved the way for them by dating a bunch of terrible douchebags, blond American Psychos with popped collars and vacation homes on the Cape. She started this processional in junior high and ended it with her comparatively normal, albeit exorbitantly wealthy husband, Miles. Violet’s college boyfriend had trouble making eye contact and seemed to be viewing them all as potential lab specimens. By the time Ryan came along, Liza’s parents were desensitized, barely batted an eye at the tattoos on his forearms. But she wondered how they would handle his less visible shortcomings: his crippling anxiety, his bouts of severe depression, the way that sometimes she came into a room and didn’t recognize him, saw only a man-child with such a despondent expression that she began to question every single happy moment they’d had together.
    It had started to get bad last year, when they moved to Chicago from Philly so she could start teaching in the psych department at UIC. Soon, there were days when he wouldn’t get out of bed, days when she had late classes but would be up at six and by the time she left the house at two she would have finished grading an entire section’s worth of papers and he would still be sleeping. There were the evenings when she would come home late and find that he had eaten toast for dinner and watched six episodes of Breaking Bad, and she would curl against him on the couch and he would say things about how he felt hopeless— existentially hopeless was a real, actual phrase that her real, live partner had legitimately used—and she would make gentle suggestions that he call an old colleague or one of his friends from grad school. And then, of course, came his excuses: Steve Gibbons lived in L.A. now; Mike Zimmerman had never really liked him; he hadn’t turned on his computer in two months.
    Eventually she’d stopped suggesting. At some point she’d started coming home and making herself toast for dinner and joining him on the couch. Yet frequently, repeatedly, she found herself seized with the desire to take him by his bony shoulders and tell him to snap out of it. Stop sleeping so much, she wanted to say. Start sleeping a normal amount like a normal person and wake up at a normal time and go make something happen . It wasn’t the lethargy of his depression that she didn’t understand: it was her instinct, most days, to sleep through her alarm as well. She loved their bed more than she loved just about any other place in the world. Left to her own devices, without the outside pressures of a mortgage and a classroom full of entitled undergraduate people, she would have stayed in bed all day many days. She would cave, indulgently, to the cloying siren call of instant Netflix and take-out crispy rolls from Penny’s and the sweet satisfaction of ignoring her phone every time it rang. That part she got, because she knew what it was like to be tired.

    The part that bothered her was his lack of desire to make anything of himself. She was bothered by his potential, sitting latent but resoundingly reinforced by a number of intelligent