The Mermaid of Brooklyn by Amy Shearn Read Free Book Online

warn her that her face would stick that way, but it kind of already had. “Oh, Jenny.” I knew what she was thinking, and while I understood why, I still didn’t think he was having an affair. It just seemed so . . . normal. Too normal. Or maybe too horrible. At least a gambling binge was nothing personal. It was expensive and demoralizing, but it didn’t implicate me, my personal failings, my waning attractiveness. At least I didn’t think it did.
    “Well, actually, he did call”—Rose started squalling, and I stood up to sway, a baby-soothing automaton—“and said he was stopping for cigarettes on the way home. Around seven. Last night.”
    “And?”
    “And nothing. That was the last I heard from him,” I said, pressing at the quiver in my cheeks. “God, could it be any hotter? What do you think it is, like, a hundred degrees?”
    Emma stood on one of the jets of the fountain, leaping off and squealing when the water shot out. I wanted to feel that filthy city water on the bottoms of my feet. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to trade places with Betty. I wouldn’t stand off to the side, frowning at my friend that way. I would lie down along the jets, letting the sewer-warmed water pound at my back. I would play and play and play and then go home and lie on the bed, fun-weary and sun-soaked, and look out the window and be bored, and then someone would make me dinner and bathe me and read me stories as I fell asleep. It sounded like heaven.
    “Aren’t you worried? What if something happened to him at the store? Or on the train?”
    “I don’t know.” I was annoyed that I’d said anything at all. It made it real, which I wasn’t quite ready for. I didn’t want to find out he was having an affair and have to acknowledge the chest pains I suffered every time Laura suggested, weirdly hopefully, that he might be. I definitely didn’t want to know if something terrible had happened to him, if he was expensively languishing in some ER somewhere with amnesia or a gunshot wound.
    Depressingly enough, the best option was that he’d once again taken our down payment and was slapping it down on an Atlantic City poker table, charming a busload of retirees. The thing was, he often had a lot of luck. It was both the best and worst part of the whole situation. When he came home from a poker night with anextra thousand dollars or two for me, telling me to get something nice, do something fun with the girls, what could I do? I had to not act too happy about it, though it was always like a ray of light bleeding through the gray wool of everyday life. As soon as I ordered in a lavish meal of sushi, or signed Betty up for a stupidly expensive toddler music class, or hired a babysitter for a few hours and went and sat by myself somewhere and did nothing, I was complicit, like the greedy peasant wife in a fairy tale whose husband makes a deal with a devil so they can eat roast goose. And I wasn’t quite big enough, or good enough at being poor, to refuse his money because I didn’t approve of where it came from, to go back to eating gruel. “When the girls are old enough to understand, you have to stop this,” I’d say, sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom, ordering an inappropriately gorgeous roll of damask or oil-slick-shiny patent-leather boots that cost about the same as a week of day care. He’d flash that smile of his and say, “You worry too much, you know that?”
    “Maybe you should call the police? Or something?” Laura said.
    “Uch, yes. Possibly. I think his mother did, or is going to,” I said, swaying, rubbing Rose’s back through the fabric of the sling. “Can we talk about something else?”
    “That’s just so weird. Harry, what are you doing?” Laura sighed. “Isn’t it weird how little you can know a person? How you can think you know a person more than you know yourself, how you can think you know everything about them and then it turns out you don’t?”
    “That’s