The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' Read Online Free PDF

grunt.
Yoo hoo. Remember me?
    The clock radio said 7:06. The wineglasses on the wicker tray by the window said I’d failed Maureen the night before. Sophie’s wet nose poked my wrist. “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute,” I muttered. Swung my feet to the floor and padded toward the bathroom, Sophie following. Chet groaned and stretched, wagged his tail, and joined the pissing party. You almost never saw that dog without a grin on his face.
    Mid-leak, Maureen came in, a wineglass stem in each fist. She dumped the dregs with so much determination that wine spattered on the wall.
    “Hey,” I said. “What do you say I give the dogs a quick run, then we go someplace for breakfast?”
    She rinsed the glasses, kept me waiting. “Can’t,” she finally said.
    “You can’t, or you’d rather not eat eggs with a shithead like me?”
    No forgiving smile. No look in my direction. She grabbed a washcloth, wiped the glasses so hard they squeaked. “I’m taking Velvet to breakfast.”
    I stood there, nodding. Touché.
    In that system of signals Mo and I had worked out with Dr. Patel, there was no shorthand for “I’m sorry.” You were obliged to
speak
those two words. But the mention of Maureen’s breakfast buddy short-circuited any contrition I’d been generating.
    Mo’s field was gerontology, but after we moved out West and she took the school nurse’s job, she found she enjoyed working with the high school kids. She liked the needy ones, particularly. “Just give them an aspirin and send them back to class,” I kept advising her. Instead, she’d help them with their math, counsel them on their love lives, give them rides and lunch money. I’d warned Mo to observe boundaries with Velvet, especially. Velvet Hoon was like a Cape Cod undertow: if you weren’t careful, she’d pull you in deeper than you meant to go. I spoke from experience.
    I pulled on my sweats, laced up my running shoes. If she wanted to spend her weekend morning with a dysfunctional sixteen-year-old instead of with her husband, then fine. Fuck it. Maybe I’d leave thedogs home, do a long run—the eight-miler out to Bear Creek Lake and back. I was halfway out the door when she said something about a rain check.
    I stopped. Our eyes met for a nanosecond. “Yeah, whatever,” I said. Bounding past me down the stairs, the dogs almost sent me tumbling.
    Outside, it was see-your-breath cold. Flurries possible tomorrow, they said. Goddamn thin Colorado air. It was different back in Connecticut. By mid-April, the sea breezes began to cut you some slack. Aunt Lolly had probably gotten her garden rototilled by now, I figured. She may have even put her peas in the ground. When she called on Sunday, I’d be sure to get the weekly farm and weather reports, along with a complaint or two about her hired man, Ulysses—”Useless,” she called him—and an update on the latest shenanigans being pulled by “those goddamned toy soldiers down the road.” Lolly had it in for the paramilitary regime that now ran the maximum-security version of what she still stubbornly referred to as “Grandma’s prison.” Like her paternal grandmother, who had served as superintendent of the Bride Lake State Farm for Women from 1913 to 1953, Aunt Lolly, too, had been a Bride Lake long-timer, albeit a rank-and-filer. For forty of her sixty-eight years, she’d been a second-shift custody officer—a CO. “Of course, that was back when they let us treat the gals like human beings instead of cockroaches,” she’d say. “Nowadays they’ve got all those captains and majors and lieutenants strutting around like it’s May Day in Moscow, and they don’t know shit from Shinola about how to run a ladies’ jail.”
    Out in the backyard, I was doing my stretches and deliberating about whether or not to go back in for a cap and gloves when I heard leaves crackling in the woods behind our place. The dogs heard it, too. They stood rigid, staring at the clearing, Chet emitting a low,