You Have the Wrong Man Read Online Free PDF

the truck was going full swing outside my window. It had a new tic, an unmistakable gushing followed by a sizzle, then nine or ten drips slowing, until the last drip never seemed to come before the gushing started over again.
    The next day I took Pamela to my dentist. The dentist bonded her front teeth together so they would stay in correct alignment as her gums healed over the jostled roots. She would not lose any teeth. She told the dentist she had had a fall playing tennis. He lifted his eyebrows, and I too wondered how she had been injured, since the rest of the story was a charade. Her teeth were indeed loose, but from what? Perhaps it was a self-inflicted injury, but I didn’t hope for that. It was more upsetting to think Pamela had created her own assailant, imitated his anger, and invented his violence against herself. It was more likely that someone had become irritated with her and slapped her hard.
    Pamela was lying on the sofa eating ice cream that I had bought for her, hand-packed, at the Portuguese grocery. She had not mentioned the bloody snip, and so I asked her about it. “Where did you get tripe at that hour?”
    Pamela sat up straight. She put the bowl of ice cream on the floor. “You knew it was tripe?”
    “Not at first.”
    “Shit. You’re unbelievable, you know that?” Pamela looked at the floor and moved the bowl of ice cream with her foot distractedly until it was halfway to me. “You let me go on and on like this since yesterday? You knew it wasbullshit? God, what is it like to be so
perfect
? You go around trying on other people’s shoes? I guess you have so much
insight.
You’re so sweet. Sweeter than sugar—”
    “Where did you get tripe in the middle of the night?” I asked her.
    “Where? Star Market. It’s open twenty-four hours, remember?”
    “You hurt my feelings,” I told her. I picked up a magazine and fluttered the pages, to show her that I was living with it. I wasn’t put off. When she saw this, she stormed out of the room. I must have appeared too much like one of those teachers who can’t be ruffled by a spitball, and this infuriated Pam. Maybe she was hoping I would use the techniques from my brother’s paperback book about “tough love.” If I had followed those puerile hints, she could stomp off feeling justified. She was paralyzed by my cheery intrusions, by my unfathomable maternal impulses—loving shrugs, my shoulders shifting like downy wings. My tactics were for my own survival as much as for hers. Mothering someone helps keep me in line, but I couldn’t admit that to her, could I?
    In a few minutes, Pamela walked back down the stairs and straight out the front door. That night Leon showed up. He told me he didn’t intend to stay long, just long enough to tell Pamela he wasn’t interested in her games. I suspect he didn’t know the whole truth about the “nose,” but he told me he assumed it was bullshit or Pam would have opted for the extra publicity that going to the police would have brought into it. If there was an ounce of truth in it, she would have contacted the newspapers. He told me he had watched her tricks, several times, and he had had enough.
    “She needs professional help,” Leon told me, and I nodded. I felt sad that we weren’t everything she needed. Why couldn’t we be everything, Leon and I? I have felt powerless before. Several times in my life I have looked at my mirror and tried to gauge my level of psychic energy, how much was left? I’ve always wondered at the tiny ration of strength we all start with and how it either intensifies or lessens. Like with watercolors, a little bit goes a long way; diluted, it makes a wash that can cover a whole lifetime with one weak color, or you might use it in a concentrated dollop here or there. I suppose the way I have lived my life, my strength has surfaced as an unremarkable sky blue, a domestic sky with neither the exuberance of dawn nor the inky ritual of night.
    Leon sat down across