The Suicide Motor Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

do through it.
    â€œCarla, listen,” he said.
    â€œNo, Bob, you listen.”
    That was when she flipped a coin on the table so he could hear its potent
chink
and wobble. She had looked at herself in the mirror as she did it. She looked good holding a phone, threatening a man. She could have been on
All My Children
.
    â€œWell, that’s interesting,” she had said.
    â€œWhat? What was it?”
    â€œHeads or tails, you mean?”
    â€œYeah.”
    Silence.
    â€œThat’s for you to find out.”
    She had hung up.
    That had been a month ago.
    Now her lover was all banged to hell and the car he loved so much was junk. The wife was in a coma or something, the paper had said so. Now Carla was here, ready to stand tall and healthy over Robert’s bed and let him see what he missed. Ready, if he was going to die, and it sounded like he might, to send him out of the world thinking about her.
    She walked into his room.
    God, he looked worse than she had imagined.
    His
arm
was gone; the paper didn’t say that.
    â€œOh, Robert,” she said.
    So many bandages, like a mummy.
    It was almost funny.
    His eye was a closed slit in a patch of yellow skin.
    He was out.
    â€œRobert,” she said, moving toward his bed.
    God, the tubes, the IV bag, this was like a movie.
    She made her face look sympathetic and concerned. This was where he would open his eye and see her. She put her hand on her belly, gently, significantly, so he would know about inchworm in a glance, never mind that it was almost certainly not his. Robert always pulled out. She and the bookie had both been too drunk to know if he had pulled out, which meant he probably hadn’t.
    â€œRobert, look at you,” she said a little louder, letting her voice hitch.
    This was his cue to look at her.
    Robert wasn’t opening his eye.
    He didn’t move at all.
    But something moved to her right.
    A woman had been sitting in the chair, blocked from her view by the open door. Could it be the wife? She had imagined her prettier, though, to be fair, she might look okay if not for the swelling and the wicked paint job the bruises had done on her.
    The woman stood.
    Was she trembling?
    Carla felt her eyebrow rise, the way it always rose in confrontations. She didn’t like the eyebrow. It made her look smug and, even if she felt that way, smug wasn’t a good way to look. She tried to put it down, but it wouldn’t go.
    The woman’s eyes were blue like the sky in a fairy tale.
    The whites white as summer clouds.
    Eyes like that boy’s.
    â€œYou must be Judith,” she said, brightening her voice a little too much when she said her rival’s name.
    The woman looked her in the eye, then dropped her gaze to where Carla’s hand lay on her belly. She looked at Carla’s eyes again.
    Carla got her eyebrow down.
    The woman was standing with the help of a cane.
    Carla got the idea that the woman wanted to beat her to death with that cane. As if reading her mind, the woman carefully set the cane on the chair.
    Carla knew she should talk now.
    â€œI just want you to know that I’m so . . .”
    The fist loomed up overhand, fast, so fast.
    Carla heard her own nose break.
    Sat down hard.

4
    â€œDO YOU HAVE VIOLENT EPISODES OFTEN?”
    â€œI wouldn’t say often.”
    The man wrote on his tablet. His legs were crossed at the knee, the toe of an expensive shoe pointing up. Overhead lights reflected in his eyeglasses.
    â€œAnd you said she isn’t pressing charges.”
    â€œNot if I pay for her nose job. And see you once a week.”
    He smiled a practiced smile.
    â€œDo you think she felt remorse?”
    â€œI think she didn’t want to look like a whore at the trial.”
    â€œYou mentioned she was at the funeral.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œTell me how you feel about that.”
    â€œI don’t feel anything.”
    A silver angelfish with black