The Unfortunates Read Online Free PDF

failed school. Failed, by bland catastrophe—nearsightedness long undiagnosed, truancy, Carol. In Lincoln, Maine, Iris finished high school but forgot about libraries—her father, still with them, working the paper plants up and down the coast. (We met at the margarine factory, her mother said, when Iris asked how they fell in love.) At least the pool cleaners’ indifference is honest. The Somners’ people, she can’t read. How to know, when nice and good wear the same face but are not the same? She’s only sure of George and Victor.
    “Unusual,” the father said to the son, the first time he saw the pool, its bottom and sides painted black, its edges rounded imperfectly to trick the eye into seeing a pond. “Hard to tell what’s what.”
    On account of this opacity they claim the pool is dirty as often as they like.
    “Anybody walk in by accident at night?” the son asks. “We can install lights around the perimeter. Safer. Solar charge. Right, Dad?”
    No lights, she tells them. The pool’s aesthetic in keeping—George’s phrase, his sound, more and more replacing her own—with the philosophy of the house.
    3D trails her back up the drive. She sets to pulling weeds from the flagstone at the front door. What do they buy with the money they make, cleaning a clean pool? She pictures the son jamming on a vintage Fender at the mall, the price tag hanging from the strap, pictures them at home, sunk in front of a glossy flatscreen, laughing at what a moron she is, learning the remote. In her old life, she would’ve been a person to them. Here, she is Wife. Silently, she justifies herself—two years ago, I was a bartender in a college town. For a decade. Sticky floor, flat tap, black mop. The college was at the top of one of the scarred granite hilltops common to northern New York. A hill like a mountain, the cluster of austere old department buildings its stone crown. Roads climbed like greedy creeper up to the college. Within the campus were sweeping colonnades of tall, bending trees. The streets outside had what the students needed: a drugstore, a taco joint, the bars, a grocery. Town below, there was her apartment and a sad-carpet guitar store—to which, her first week there, she sold her guitar—and the highway. Evenings, as she wound her car up the black roads to work, the bars strung together by their neon looked like the tilting lights of a shoreline from a ship. To the right of her bar was a bar and to the left of her bar was a bar. In the bar on the right was a woman who stood between the faded Heimlich poster and the bottles. In the bar on the left was a woman who stood between the bottles and a fresher Heimlich poster. Iris’s bar did not have a poster.
    One night she carded this kid. The kid still comes to mind, not because she loved him but because he was right before she met George. He is the bright rip of before and after, where her life split in two. She carded all the kids, what with the bat cameras suckered up in the corners of the wall behind her, what with not giving a shit about the kids having fun. The date on his license—a twenty-first birthday. “You’re all grown up,” she said, making a perfunctory flap to the stoolflies until they wet-worked their eyes off the shelves of booze and raised their glasses. The kid looked mortified. She poured a shot of tequila and topped it with Everclear and set it on fire with the apple-green plastic lighter she kept under the bar by the sink rag, put the shot in his right hand and a basket of tortilla chips in his left. “Ta-da,” she said. He thanked her. Polite for a healthy-looking Ivy in a T-shirt that read LACROSSE PENNANT CHAMPIONS, NORTH EAST DIVISION II, 2008 . The shirt was a film, wash-worn. They all wore their clothes that way. To say—my mother doesn’t dress me and I’ve had this shit a million years—I’m not trying to impress anybody. That these kids were fooling no one she found endearing. Her clothes and the clothes of the