The Story Hour Read Online Free PDF

as a way of hurting him, punishing him for all the things she held him responsible for—for the four years when her mother lay dying of cancer, for the fact that she died despite the torturous, barbaric treatments and surgeries, for the fact that he had married Sybil Miller, a wealthy widow from Florida, and had moved to Naples with her soon after Maggie left for college, as if his years with her mother and her had been a mirage, as if all he’d done was bide his time, counting the minutes until she left home for the first and last time. And then there was the other business, but she never permitted herself to think of that anymore, the memory of it too dark and confusing.
    Maggie felt a spurt of anger. Years and years of no contact and then a phone call out of the blue. The easy familiarity of calling her “baby girl,” as if the intervening years of silence had never happened, as if he had not ceased to be a father the minute she’d entered college, leaving her to fend for herself at Wellesley. Her first summer from college, Sybil had invited her down to Naples, but after two weeks of staying with them in Sybil’s sprawling home, of watching her father and a woman she didn’t know frolic like lovesick teenagers in the pool, of catching him pinch his new wife’s bottom when he thought she wasn’t looking, of seeing her father—a man who had worked two jobs for as long as she could remember, one as a maintenance man at Columbia University and the other as a clerk at the neighborhood convenience store—dress up each evening in a Hawaiian shirt and freshly pressed chinos to go to the country club to play cards all night, after two weeks of being around a man who treated her as if she were a distant niece he was rather fond of rather than his only daughter, whose eyes were mysteriously unburdened by the weight of those dark years when his wife had lain in her bed growing pasty and skinny as the cancer ate her alive, who dabbed a little aftershave on his shirt just before he left for the club, as if to keep his nostrils from remembering the smells of rubbing alcohol and morphine and bleach, after two weeks of suffocating in Sybil’s air-conditioned, museum-like home, Maggie bolted. Used the last of her work-study money to buy a plane ticket to New York. Their old neighbor, Mrs. Tabot, her mother’s best friend, had taken her in, just as Maggie had known she would. She would spend all four summers during her years at Wellesley in Mrs. Tabot’s brownstone in Brooklyn.
    â€œHello? Baby girl? You there?” Wallace was saying.
    â€œDon’t call me that.” She hated how peevish her voice sounded and hated herself a bit more when she heard his chuckle.
    â€œYou sore this early in the mornin’?” he said. “Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, huh?”
    She sighed. “What do you want, Dad?” she said. “Is everything okay?”
    â€œâ€™Course it is,” he exclaimed in the cheerful voice he now spoke in, which made him sound like an Amway salesman. “Sybil an’ me are gonna be passin’ your way tomorrow and thought we’d like to stop and see you, is all. We’re drivin’ to Oregon to attend her godchild’s daughter’s wedding. Thought it’d be fun to stop and visit with you and that husband of yours. You gon’ be around?”
    She’d ended up inviting them to dinner the next night. Wallace and Sybil had not been in their home even though she and Sudhir had lived there for over ten years. In fact, her father and Sudhir had met only twice. She had visited Sudhir’s parents, who lived halfway across the world in Calcutta, more often than that.
    The shock of seeing how old Wallace looked since she’d seen him last helped her to be polite to him for the entire evening. That and taking her cues from Sudhir, who, as always, was an impeccable host, attentive and gracious. She noticed the