And One Last Thing... by Molly Harper Read Free Book Online

Unwilling to think about what the morning would bring, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to sleep.

5 • The Shoe Drops
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    I woke just before noon feeling oddly hungover. For a second, I wondered why I was in my old room at my parents’ house before it all rushed back.
    It wasn’t a nightmare. I’d actually sent the thing.
    I sat up and winced at the pain in my neck from sleeping in a nonorthopedic twin bed. If memory served, I had given up on sleeping around 4:00 a.m. and spent the wee hours of the morning signing Mike up for magazine subscriptions ranging from Hustler to Knitters’ Digest. I called telemarketing agencies and left them messages to call Mike’s number. Under a slightly less legal heading, I placed classified ads on Craigslist, Freecycle, the Pennysaver, and the Singletree Messenger offering Mike’s brandnew bass boat for a rock-bottom price of zero dollars. He was going to be getting a lot of phone calls. A lot of phone calls.
    Phone calls. I pressed my hand to my grainy, tired eyes. Mike had no idea where I was. He probably came home this morning to an empty, locked house and reported me as a missing person. I was going to end up another missing blond, white woman on the news.
    I ran to the dresser for my cell phone and checked my voice mail. There was one message: “Hi, honey, it’s me. I’m still at the office. Thank God for those clean shirts you sent me, huh? I’m sorry -”
    A bubble of hope slipped up from my stomach to my spine. There was the voice of the man I married. He still cared. He was grateful for something I’d done. He was sorry. Maybe I could send a follow-up message to everyone on the mailing list asking them to delete the first message without reading it. Maybe -…
    “I’m sorry to do this to you twice in a row, but I’m not going to be home tomorrow night either. I’ve got to go to a Lions Club thing and then I’m supposed to meet Brent Loudermilk about some Little League thing he wants the firm to cosponsor. Who knows how late that could go? See you later.”
    The bubble burst.
    Mike was so disconnected from me, from our home, that he hadn’t even realized that he’d been locked out of it. He hadn’t spoken to me in almost forty-eight hours and he still had plans to go out. And I sincerely doubted it was to a Lions Club dinner. I could have been actually missing and he wouldn’t have noticed.
    I went into my parents’ bathroom and ran a scalding hot tub. They had the only updated bathroom in the house and I was in dire need of a bath that didn’t involve rubber duckie non-slip decals. Peeling off my grimy, long-past-their-prime khakis and T-shirt, I slipped into the tub. The nip of the water felt good, a connection back to the reality I’d only kept casual contact with over the last few days. I sank to my chin, then my nose, letting my breath make little ripples across the surface of the water.
    Now that the initial shock had worn off, I kept expecting this wave of depression to overtake me, a heavy weight in my chest that would pull me under and crush me with its force. But that precious bubble of hope had popped and I didn’t feel anything: nothing good, nothing bad. Nothing. I think I was more depressed when George Clooney left ER. It felt like I was rooting around in my brain, probing it like a sore tooth, trying to find some hidden abscess of misery. Surely a normal person wouldn’t feel like this at the end of a marriage, the destruction of a life. A normal person would feel something -…
    I heard my cell phone ring from my room.
    Uh-oh.
    I let the phone ring until it sent the call to voice mail. Then Mama’s phone rang from her nightstand and Daddy’s private office line down the hall jangled to life. Apparently the e-mails had landed.
    Well, if I couldn’t feel depressed, dread would have to do.
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    My voice mails were an odd and interesting mix that