Trying the Knot Read Online Free PDF Page A

Picking his toenails was a pastime he treasured as
much as Vange relished smoking. He also smoked, but it was
joylessly and more out of habit. Each vice came with its own risk –
cancer or ingrown toenails – one painful and deadly, and the other
just painful. If you were really unlucky, you got both.
    Trying to visualize his dead aunt, who had a
few ingrown toenails removed in her short lifetime, he fiddled with
his feet. He speculated that his aunt’s ingrown toenail problem had
contributed to her shoe obsession. Immediately after marrying his
uncle, Vange’s mother had a garage sale and sold all of his aunt’s
possessions. Maybe the women of Portnorth did not mind wearing her
shoes because she was so respected, but more than likely it was
because she never wore the same pair twice. It was ironic his uncle
went from being married to a saint to a sinner within eight months.
The scandal provided Portnorth’s coffee klatch with plenty of
gossip.
    “What did your mom do with all the money she
made from selling my aunt’s things?”
    Evangelica’s curiosity shifted to concern.
“What’s up with the dead aunt obsession already? I don’t know, they
probably went on a Caribbean cruise or bought something totally
ridiculous like a riding lawnmower.”
    His moribund silence made her shiver. “I
can’t vegetate here any longer. Let’s go eat. You lured me here
with the promise of a real holiday feast, remember?”
    “Oh, yeah, it’s Easter,” Thad said. He
inspected his throbbing toe while he imagined his aunt limping
toward him. She was wearing a pink bathrobe with curlers in her
hair, carrying a box of day old jelly donuts, and she warned him
against a fate cursed with one-night stands that lingered like
ingrown toenails.
    Abruptly, he sprang to his feet and jumped
into his Pepe jeans. He threw on her silky purple shirt because she
was wearing his forest green shaker-knit sweater with holes in the
elbows. He did not bother to wash before venturing outside because
apathetic uncleanliness seemed the most natural attitude to sport.
There was no one to impress. It was seven o’clock and the town’s
entire population was home, lethargic from holiday ham anticipating
the series finales of Dallas, thirtysomething, and Twin Peaks.
    Thad snatched the driftwood crucifix from the
wall. Vange smeared lipstick across her mouth, and the matte red
Cherries in the Snow made her look even more ghostly.
    While riding in the truck, Thad noticed the
buildings that were not boarded up were closed. The streetlights
had not yet turned on, and the dismal vacancy of their surroundings
was uninspiringly grim at best. As time stood still, tiny
snowflakes drifted from the sheet-like gray sky. They had checked
out of civilization and returned to a post-Apocalyptic aftermath.
Vange drove the lone vehicle down the salt-stained Main Street with
reckless abandon, and each time she accelerated he found himself
pressed further against a figurative brick wall. Dread oozed from
her pores as her stomach gurgled with nausea.
    As they drove over railroad tracks running
through the middle of town, Thad pulled his long bangs over his
eyes. As a kid, he used to imagine far off destinations as
locomotives carried limestone into the distance away from town. It
never occurred to him to ask any one of his three generations of
quarry-employed relatives where the tracks led. He only knew that
they stretched far away from the one-company town’s cavernous hole
in the ground.
    Thad thought aloud, “When did the train stop
running like a getaway car at all hours?”
    “Want to picnic on the beach?”
    “No matter how hard you try, you can’t ever
see Canada,” Thad said. From behind his bangs he peered deep into
the hazy horizon, past the frigid succession of endless waves.
    “Want to know something totally gnarly,”
Vange began, and she slowed the truck down as they drove past the
beach. “I’m in real deep shit.
    “How so?”
    “I think I’m