Where Love Goes Read Online Free PDF Page B

was buttering her toast, he suddenly got a wave of Galen’s scent from his fingers and felt like a thief.
    Ursula was usually a heavy sleeper, but there was this one night. Galen was tied, spread-eagled, against the washer/dryer in the laundry room, and he was fucking her from behind with the dryer set to tumble, hot, so it vibrated her breasts in a way she loved. “I promise I’ll do a better job on your shirts next time, Mr. Woody,” she was pleading. “I’ll never leave that ring around the collar again.” All of a sudden Ursula was standing there, holding her blanket, looking at them.
    “I wanted juice,” she said, in that husky, nighttime voice of hers. “I kept calling. You didn’t hear me.”
    Tim covered Galen with a couple of towels that were folded on top of the dryer and wrapped another one around his own waist. He was untying Galen’s wrists while he talked to Ursula.
    “This is a friend of mine,” he told her. “We were doing laundry.”
    Ursula drifted into the kitchen. In the glow of the refrigerator he reached for a Dallas Cowboys cup and poured her Hi-C. Neither one of them said anything more about Galen. When he tucked her back into bed, he said, “Sometimes kids see stuff that might seem scary. That just means things happen sometimes that you’re too young to understand.”
    “I understand, Daddy,” she said. She patted his head. “It’s okay. You do a good job.”
    Galen left quickly. Tim called her the next morning to say he couldn’t see her anymore. “I have to just be a dad right now,” he said.
    “It’s been fun,” she said. She said she’d like it if they could still be friends though, which surprised him, considering that they’d hardly ever done anything besides screw.
    It turned out that Galen loved nineteenth-century English novels, Jane Austen in particular, and that she had a fascination with moss, which was the subject of her master’s thesis. (She liked to fuck on it, that much he knew. But she also knew a good deal about moss propagation and little-known species, it turned out.) He ended up advising her on the thesis, and sometimes, late at night, she’d call him and tell him about how things were going with her current boyfriend. The guy liked to spank her with a leather strap, and she wasn’t always sure, this time, if he had a good attitude. She told him to stop one time and he just kept hitting her harder. Tim knew the strap she was talking about, of course. The thought of somebody doing that to Galen sickened him. He was ashamed that he’d ever spanked her himself.
    The memory of their nights together is not much different than a movie he watched a long time ago. Since Galen he has lived like a monk. Or like Mr. Rogers, he used to tell her, although he knew, if he and Galen were still seeing each other, she would probably want to have him put on a cardigan sweater and let her suck his cock while he sang “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
    B lue Hills isn’t much of a town for nightlife, especially if you aren’t part of a married couple, because most people in this town are. Weekends when her children go with their father Claire rents movies from the thirties and forties—romantic comedies mostly—and watches them in bed with her long underwear on and a big bowl of popcorn. She puts on the country albums her kids hate—Patsy Cline, Vern Gosdin, Randy Travis, Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill. One time she played George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today” twelve times in a row. There’s a love story for you: a song about a man whose heart stays true to the woman he adores, decades after she’s left him. The day he stops loving her is the day the undertaker hauls his body away.
    Sometimes Claire barely hears another human voice from Friday evening until Sunday dinnertime, when she picks the children up. She may take a walk or go to the gym with her friend Nancy, who is also divorced, but without kids, and sometimes