Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You Read Online Free PDF Page B

Novocain.
    â€œ. . . really convenient, just a mile from the train depot. An hour from the airport and New York City.”
    Still, Merissa was silent. For what she wanted to ask, she could not dare ask. A flicker of impatience came into her father’s face.
    â€œWe’ll talk more, Merissa. A lot more. Okay? And you’ll come visit—soon as I get settled?”
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    Now, in the days following, Merissa heard her mother on the phone, often.
    Not talking with her father, though. But talking.
    (To her women friends? To those friends who, like her, had husbands who’d “moved out—temporarily”?)
    Laughing, or maybe crying. Breathless and dazed-sounding and trying even so to be amusing.
    â€œOne of his closets was almost empty, and I was so shocked, I said to him, ‘Morgan, what? What is this? Are you moving out of our house without telling me?’ and Morgan laughs in that way of his like I’ve said something ridiculous and tells me straight-faced, ‘My clothes are at the dry cleaner’s, Stacy—I’ve been forgetting to pick them up.’ And I was so pathetic, wanting to believe him, I said, ‘Oh, I’ll pick your clothes up at the cleaner’s, I’m going into town tomorrow morning,’ and Morgan says, like it’s all he can do to force himself to look at me, ‘Stacy, I don’t have the receipt—I’m not sure which dry cleaner it is.’ And I say, just so naive, ‘But why isn’t it Kraft’s? We’ve been using Kraft’s for years.’ And I said, ‘There are only two dry cleaners in Quaker Heights, or maybe three—if you count the one out on Route 27—but you wouldn’t have gone to that one, would you?’ And Morgan says, ‘I’ll take care of it, Stacy,’ and shuts the closet door.”
    Merissa thought, This does not sound like a joint decision.Merissa thought, Pathetic!
    More coolly, calmly: He wouldn’t do this to us, really.
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    Text messages flew. So many, within an hour. Merissa’s thumbs ached. Her head ached. Within minutes of sending a text message—within seconds of receiving one—Merissa forgot what the message was, to whom and from whom.
    TINK—HEY. GUESS WHAT. YOU NEVER LIKED MY FATHER—(IT’S COOL, IT’S OK, HE NEVER LIKED YOU EITHER, DUDE!)—SO YOU WON’T BE SURPRISED. I GUESS HE’S IN LOVE WITH SOME YOUNG BEAUTIFUL MODEL LIKE A TV HAIR SHAMPOO MODEL ALL GLOSSY SWINGING HAIR AND PERFECT SKIN. AND BOOBS! YOU BET.
    LOVE FROM
    THE PERFECT ONE
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    Merissa reread her message to Tink. Laughed and wiped at her eyes. No address for Tink! No choice but to delete.
    More calmly, Merissa thought really, really this could not be so. Hadn’t her father said it was a joint decision? He would not have lied to Merissa’s face, would he?
    Tink had told many tales of the Enemy: the Male Sex.
    But you couldn’t believe Tink much of the time. She’d been a TV child actor, and you’d think she’d been a stand-up comic, the extravagant and shameless way she exaggerated things.
    All men are beasts. But not all beasts are men.
    Definitely—they will bite the tits that feed them.
    (Was this funny? Or vulgar? Merissa had laughed at the time, but she’d been just a little put-off by Tink, then the “new girl” in their circle who talked, talked, talked rapidly when she was—as she didn’t hesitate to inform them—in her manic bipolar state.)
    Oh but it was sad: pathetic. Here in the Carmichael household.
    Nothing funny here. Even Tink would agree.
    Merissa’s poor mother, Stacy Carmichael, was that age—forty-five? Older?—like one of those still-attractive-but-fading middle-aged women you saw in TV advertisements promising miracle medication to combat migraines, hot flashes, insomnia, and depression.
    In one of the scarier TV ads, a ghost-cloud of gloom hovers about the