A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer Read Free Book Online Page B

to Saks and sniffed thirty tester bottles before finding which fragrance was hers, and then he bought a small bottle and kept it in his desk at the office. May I help you? May I help you? The clerks on the main floor had kept trying to make themselves available to him. But they couldn’t help him; nobody could.
    “Feel my forehead,” Kate says. “I think I have a fever.”
    He touches her with his fingertips and then the palm of his hand. A jolt of remembered love goes through him. The car drifts left, the tires bite at the gravel at the side of the road. “You’re warm.”
    “I’m dying.”
    a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
    She closes her eyes and their silence reasserts itself.
    “Did you have an okay time tonight?” Daniel asks. As his sense of guilt increases, his tolerance for silence decreases. He knows he’s just blather-ing, but she did seem to like Hampton. She who likes no one.
    “Not really. It felt like work.”
    “You seemed to be enjoying yourself,” he says. “You and Hampton—”
    “Fuck me and Hampton,” Kate says, and turns her face away from him, as the two-lane blacktop turns into a narrower dirt road that leads to their secluded old house. They drive past a neighbor’s rolling fields, a pond ringed by weeping willows. A pebble driveway leads from the road to their house, and as the stones crunch beneath the tires, Kate opens her eyes.Their car’s headlights shine on the red wreck of the baby-sitter’s car.
    “I hope Mercy treats children better than she treats her car,” Daniel says. He turns off the engine; the lighted windows in their front rooms shimmer before them.
    “Why did you tell that story about that little boy?” he asks her.
    Kate sits up, rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Did you like that story?”
    “I never heard of Leroy before. I thought I knew about every boy who ever passed through your life.”
    “I think what I was saying was Leroy and I could never be friends.”
    “Why? Because he was black and you were white?” Despite everything, he allows himself to feel indignant. He thinks Kate’s white southern girlhood is asserting itself in a highly unpleasant way.
    “Be glad I didn’t tell the story of why we left New York City, how you were scared to death of every black person you saw.”
    “Why would you ever say anything like that?”
    “Because it’s true, you were.”
    “My life was threatened. And the people who made the threat were black. I overreacted, I admit it.”
    “You were scared to death.”
    “Let’s just drop it,” Daniel says. “I’m over it.” He opens the door to get out, but Kate catches him by the arm.
    [ 35 ]
    “If it’s any consolation to you, the marriage won’t last.”
    “What marriage?”
    “Iris and Hampton’s. He’s on edge all the time, looking for little slights against his dignity. She wants to live in a world where a little spilled water is just an accident, not an incident.”
    Inside, Mercy Crane is on the phone, which she hangs up without a word of good-bye as soon as Kate and Daniel come in.
    Kate goes up to check on Ruby. Daniel pays Mercy and locks the door.
    He goes back into the living room to gather up the half-eaten bowl of ramen noodles and the can of Sprite she has left behind. He sees something poking out between the sofa cushions—a half-full pack of Camel Lights, with a book of matches squeezed beneath the cellophane. He tosses them onto the table, hoping for Mercy’s sake her parents don’t smell the smoke in her hair. Her father’s a cop and her mother teaches at a Christian ele-mentary school; both are known to be strict and unforgiving.
    After clearing Mercy’s little mess, he falls back onto the sofa and lights one of her cigarettes.When he moved in with Kate, she asked him not to smoke around the baby, and he went with the program and quit altogether. But now he would like to taste tobacco and inhales deeply, blows a smoke ring, and watches it make its way like a