Three Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

is from her wedding. I haven’t lived with her since she was five and my wife left me. I was a quintessential hippie then. I worked in a head shop, I was an orderly in a hospital, I sold hot dogs at the beach, I was a messenger. My wife just got sick of a life on the edge of nothing in particular and went home to her parents in Idaho. She got a divorce with a judge who considered me a menace to society because my hair was shoulder length and I smoked dope. I think off the record he also considered me a dirty Jew who had no business with a blond and lovely daughter of Idaho. He kept calling me a New Yorker, although I grew up in Worcester.
    Even after I cleaned up and finished school, she—my ex-wife Patsy—had no use for me. She never believed I’d changed. Whatever I said to her, she had this Oh Yeah look in her eyes, sort of squinted, letting me talk but never listening.
    Patsy was crazy about me when we were first together, but afterour daughter, Leaf, was born, she began to judge me and our life. I should have caught on but I was so comfortable doing whatever I felt like when I felt like it, a perennial adolescent all through my twenties, that I just never saw what was happening. I was so used to Patsy adoring me, so used to being adored, that I never noticed how pissed off she was until she took off and left me.
    Suzanne read the message that night in her office while Elena was moving stuff around in the next room. Suzanne was exhausted and would normally get into bed by ten-thirty on a Sunday night and read for fifteen to twenty minutes, something soothing like catalogs or a travel book about the Greek Islands or New Zealand. It was not that she intended to take an expensive or extensive vacation anytime soon, but someday surely she and Marta and Jim too would go off and see some of these places together. She had abandoned her earlier dreams of traveling with her daughters. Elena would not willingly go down to the corner deli with her, and Rachel was keeping kosher now, which made cooking for her less than fun. Kosher vegetarian: one of the world’s lumpier cuisines. Rachel never talked about going anyplace abroad now except Israel.
    Tonight Suzanne was overexcited. She was yeasty with hope she labeled irrational that perhaps she and Elena could actually get along, could reach some breakthrough in communication, in affection. It was a new chance. She had never expected Elena to live under her roof again. Yet now Elena’s sounds seeped through the wall. Moving furniture? Pounding nails? The sound of salsa through the wall. She had overcome her earlier stupid sense of being invaded. Wouldn’t Jake be jealous of her, not only in contact with her daughter but once again living with her? She should appreciate what she had, instead of sulking about her privacy and her routine. She was lucky to have her daughter with her, and she should dedicate some of her energy to making things better between them. Still she had her policewoman to worry about, the sexual harassment case against the Dedham Police Department. She wanted very badly to win this case, for her client Sherry, and because if she won, it would set a precedent in the area, letting many other women who had been treated just as badly come slowly out of their private hells and begin to demand justice and reparation. The Latino music camethrough the wall to her where she lay wide awake in her bed, and she found herself nodding to the beat.
    She suddenly thought of Victor, his lean body, his olive face with the sculptured cheekbones and the sensual mouth, and even after all the troubles and all the years, something moved deep down in her. How she had been mad for him. Besotted. When he touched her, her bones liquefied. Her brain turned off like a computer whose plug had been pulled. They made love mostly in Spanish, besides the universal language of their bodies. How could she have loved him so strongly? But she had. He was not her first lover, but he was the most