Through the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

in. If only we could all look at each other in that way. The outside wouldn’t even exist. It doesn’t anyway. It’s just a trick of the mind. Like the illusion created by a magician.
    I said firmly, but not unkindly, “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you, Dan.”
    The ginger ale was just past him, down the aisle. So I slid by, found a bottle, and put it in my basket. Then I circled around and went back to the freezer to put back the pint of ice cream I’d gotten, and which had already started to melt, to change it for a new one. (My mother loved ice cream frozen so hard you practically had to chip it out of the carton. She always kept our freezer on the coldest setting, and it looked like an arctic ice cap with a thick layer of frost and stalactites dripping from the ceiling.) After exchanging the ice cream, I went up to the counter to buy the two items I’d come for. I thought Dan had left the store by then, but I wasn’t sure.
    The clerk was a woman in her fifties, with hair that had been badly dyed so the gray somehow showed through the too-bright red. I thought she was looking at me funny as she rang up the two items and put them in a bag. And then, when she gave me back my change, she patted my hand and said, “You did real good.”
    I probably should have been horrified that this woman had overheard the conversation. But her words were clearly heartfelt, and in that moment they seemed to be one of those kindnesses—so small, so real, so unnecessary, and at the same time so genuine—like my mother’s painted toenails.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    Then I took the ice cream and ginger ale home to my mother, and we ate it in front of the television while watching someone win $800,000 on a cable rerun of Millionaire . And for an hour or so, even with everything wrong, life seemed perfect.

Timothy

    After the Family Dinner
     
     
     
     
    I left the family dinner ravenous. I know that’s very Freudian, but it almost always happened that way. After a three-course meal, I would leave and feel absolutely empty. Sometimes I went home like that, but then it always took forever to fall asleep. I understood why they keep watchdogs hungry if they want them to be alert.
    Edward followed me out after the dinner, and as I stepped to the curb to hail a cab, he said, “You hungry?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Starving.”
    “Ray’s?”
    “Sure,” I agreed.
    We took a cab to one of the dozens of Famous Ray’s pizza places—this one near his apartment in the West Village. I remembered the fit my mother had when Edward decided to move to the West Village. In her opinion, the Upper East Side was the only place to live. But Edward was smart. He’d waited to tell her until the purchase had gone through and he’d signed the contracts on the sale of his old place. Of course, he needed me to keep quiet about it, but I was happy to do it, mostly because I knew how angry it would make our mother.
    I escaped the Upper East Side by moving down to Tribeca, but I had the excuse that I wanted to be closer to the financial district. That worked for my mother. The money excuse always did.
    When we got to Ray’s, I ordered two plain slices, and Edward got a slice piled with so much crap on top you could barely tell it was a slice of pizza.
    “So, what’s the latest?” I asked him as we waited by the counter for our slices to heat up.
    “Emily thinks she’s found husband number four,” Edward told me.
    “Good luck to her with getting our mother to say yes to that,” I said.
    Emily would have to get our mother’s permission if she wanted to stay on the payroll. She—or rather her three ex-husbands—had gone through all her money, and now she was on a monthly allowance doled out by Mother.
    “She might not need to. This one is loaded,” Edward said.
    “Really?” I was interested. This didn’t sound like my sister’s type of husband. “Mother might even approve of him then.”
    “Oh, I don’t think so.” Edward