Bomber's Law by George V. Higgins Read Free Book Online

friends’ wives, okay?
They’re
not even that surprised, or mad. Guy finally makes a lot of money, he can rip the sweet stuff off? It’s not like he was the first one, took what he could never get. This thing goes on all the time.
    â€œBut this other thing, that Dougie does? Guy’s still ga-ga, about his own
wife
? Makes no secret of it? Don’t see
that
, that often. Kinda like makes a guy nervous, you know? Your wife happens to be there, sees him acting like that around his own wife, which naturally my Maggie does, family get-togethers and all, all you’re gonna get for a week after that’s the old deli special, my friend: hot tongue in the mornin’, cold shoulder at night, and do what you want with your pickle, my friend—just don’t try to serve it to her. Doug and Laura, all their kissy-face and oh, sweetie-pieing? They don’t make it easy on the rest of us, they go around acting like that.
    â€œBut still, they’re happy as hell; anyone can see that. And nobody can argue with that, am I right? Nobody can argue with that.
    â€œSo that is fine, they saved the money, they had the kids, and now they’re all happy and all. Dougie’s got his boat and now the kids’re growin’ up. Oldest one is nine. And they can start doing things that up ’til now they’ve been, you know, they’ve been a little young. Such as for example the Hallowe’ening, there. Trick-’r-treating, right? This year they can do that.
    â€œExcept,” Brennan said, “except that one of the things that everybody in the family notices, right off, everyone but Doug, that is, is that Laura … when the kids first start getting old enough to do some things on their own, like go on pony rides or get started down the Y—they got a real nice Y over Quincy, very nice Y there, lots of activities—they have a hard time doing that, because Laura’s coming too.
    â€œNow I don’t mean she’s the same as all the other mothers that drive the kids the Y and then sit up in the bleachers and watch them get their lessons. I mean what she does is butter up the instructors from the day she signs the kids up, and she makes sure the swimming teacher that they actually draw knows she’s got her Red Cross badge. Laura’s a certified lifeguard or whatever they call them. And then, when her kids finally start, who’s inna pool with them? Well, the young teacher is of course, but so is Mummy Laura, in her old teenage bathing suit with the Red Cross badge sewn on.
    â€œNow I can tell you, pal,” Brennan said, “Laura’s maybe still a damned good-lookin’ woman for a woman her age, and she is. But she still
is
her age, you know? And she’s still had the three kids now, since she was the Y teacher’s age, which I never knew to make a woman’s figure better-lookin’, unless she was ’way too fat when she got knocked up and her doctor said she either hadda lose a lotta weight or else she would lose the kid, and she got scared enough to do it. But that was not the case with Laura, and the long and the short of it is that as far as she’s concerned, there’s also a few years gone by since she came home after the prom and didn’t actually tell her mother that she finally let Doug use one of his prong-ons for what God meant it to be for. But of course she didn’t have to tell her mother, did she? No, because her mother already knew. She knew the minute she saw Laura come in through that the door. She was very pleased that night, Laura’s mother was. When she saw what’d happened, that she’d stayed up hoping she would see, well, she felt pretty doggoned good. Smart young girl her daughter’d turned out to be. Learned her lessons well, especially the ones her crafty old mother’d taught her, without saying a word. Just like her own mother taught her.”
    Brennan chuckled. “We can