The Tell Read Online Free PDF Page A

all,” he said.
    â€œWhich left you,” Mira paused, and gave him a teasing smile, “where, exactly? Half-formed?”
    â€œA mess?” Owen said.
    Wilton frowned at a drop of oil on his shirt. “Don’t you think that vodka episode was in bad taste, though? Poking fun at demented old people in wheelchairs, ladies who soiled themselves? Old drunks? I was just the actor. I did what I was told, so what could I say?”
    â€œHe opened the guy’s closet door and the bottles just kept tumbling out,” Owen explained to Mira. “A hundred bottles. He was log-rolling on them.”
    â€œYes, senility used to be a real scream. People take it much too seriously now, Alzheimer’s is a real conversation killer.” Wilton refilled their glasses. “Alcoholism used to be a laugh riot, too. And I should know—my father was a barrel of monkeys.”
    A small crack opened, allowing them to peek into the man’s history—and they were meant to look. Mira chased a fleck of green across her plate with her fork. Wilton rolled up one sleeve with exaggerated care. On the inside of his almost hairless arm, scars crisscrossed the skin in fine embroidery. Candlelight made the damage look like scribbles.
    â€œWhat you didn’t see,” he said, laying his arm out like a pale offering, “was what happened when I came down on the bottles. They were supposed to be plastic—but they weren’t.”
    Mira ran her finger down the raised lines. Her lips moved as she read the scars. Owen was struck by the idea of how Wilton had paid for their amusement, but more so by how Mira was touching this man with intimate curiosity. A tickle danced at the base of his skull. He hated the feeling. Mira drew her hand back and put it on her lap. Wilton’s eyelids drooped. He looked sated.
    â€œLet’s move into another room,” Mira announced into the charged silence. She stood and grabbed the second bottle of wine. “This huge house and we only live in a small part of it. We like the idea of space, but then we don’t know what to do with it when we have it. We might as well live in a cell.”
    Moving down the weighty oak hallway to the front of the house, Wilton stopped to consider the art, the details of the architecture, the newel post and panels, the table lamp that cast a glow over life’s mess: a spattering of papers, keys, change, a collection of Mira’s fluorescent orange parking tickets. He tapped the lamp’s glass shade and looked at the colors it threw onto the high ceiling. A Merchanti, he said, and sucked air in through his teeth. He appeared to know his stuff—or was pretending to. Who or what the hell was Merchanti? Owen wondered. There were two expansive rooms at the front of the house. One contained a seldom-played piano and a stiff arrangement of furniture. In the other, where they gathered, Mira turned on a single, low lamp. When she and Wilton sat on the velvet couch, the cushions exhaled the endless dander and dust of Mira’s dead relatives. You couldn’t escape it in this house, a DNA windfall. Owen sensed the room’s permanence in the solid, patrician arms of his seat, a chair that had been in its spot much longer than he had and would still be there long after he was gone. The many objects in the room regarded the three of them with superior disinterest. During the day, sun poured into this room, but to Owen, the house would always be a little cold and dark.
    Mira worked the corkscrew. Her green shirt, dotted with paint, swooped low at the neck and the rise of her chest shimmered with the faintest mist of sweat. She was beautiful in a way that didn’t always strike people immediately. What they first noticed was that her eyes were exaggerations, stretched wide, and that she had an overstated, ardent mouth. Owen knew she was embarrassed by her mouth’s fullness at times, by how people assumed its ripe offering