Commonwealth by Ann Patchett Read Free Book Online Page A

together and read Jane Kenyon’s poetry aloud. They talked about the things in life that had mystified them—mostly their children and their husbands. Wallis hadn’t liked Fix Keating any more than he liked her, and she never minded that he assigned to her full responsibility for things that could not possibly have been her fault. If she could shoulder the burden of his blame while she was alive, it was hard to imagine she’d be bothered by it now.
    “Are you cold?” Franny asked her father. “I can get you a blanket.”
    Fix shook his head. “I don’t get cold now. I get cold later. They’ll bring me a blanket when I need one.”
    Franny looked around the room for the nurse without letting her eyes linger on any of the patients—the woman asleep with her mouth open, hairless as a newborn mouse, the teenaged boy tapping on his iPad, the woman whose six-year-old sat quietly in the chair next to hers and colored in a book. How had chemo gone for Wallis? Did Larry drop her off or did he sit with her? Did their sons come up from L.A.? She would have to remember to ask her mother.
    “They’re slow getting started today,” Franny said, not that it mattered. The soup and the bread that Fix wouldn’t eat were ready at the house. Marjorie would be waiting for them. They would watch
Jeopardy!
Franny would sleep in the guest room upstairs.
    “Never be in a rush to have someone poison you. That’s my motto. I can sit here all day.”
    “When did you get to be so patient?”
    “The patient patient,” he said, pleased with himself. “So do you and Albie keep in touch?”
    Franny shrugged. “I hear from him.” Franny had talked about Albie too much in her life, and now, as if she could make up for it, she made a point of not talking about him at all.
    “And what about old Bert? How’s he doing?”
    “He seems okay.”
    “Do you talk to him very often?” Fix asked, the soul of innocence.
    “Not nearly as often as I talk to you.”
    “It isn’t a contest.”
    “No, it’s not.”
    “And he’s married now?”
    Franny shook her head. “Single.”
    “But there was a third one.”
    “Didn’t work out.”
    “Wasn’t there a fiancée though? Somebody after the third one?” Fix knew full well that Bert had had a third divorce but he never tired of hearing about it.
    “There was for a while.”
    “And the fiancée didn’t work out either?”
    Franny shook her head.
    “Well, that’s a shame,” Fix said, sounding as if he meant it, and maybe he did, but he had asked her the same questions a month before and he would ask her again a month from now, pretending that he was old and sick and didn’t remember their last conversation. Fix
was
old and sick, but he remembered everything. Keep examining the witness—that’s what he had told her over the phonewhen she was a kid and her ID bracelet had gone missing from her locker. She had called him from Virginia at five o’clock, the minute the rates went down, two o’clock California time. She called him at work. She had never called him at work before but she had his business card. He was a detective by then, and he was her father, so she figured he’d know how to find the bracelet.
    “Ask around,” her father had told her. “Find out who was changing classes and where they were going. You don’t need to make a big deal about it, don’t let anyone think you’re accusing them, but you talk to every kid who walked down that hall and then talk to them again because either there’s something they’re keeping from you or there’s something they haven’t remembered yet themselves. You have to be willing to put in the time if you’re serious about finding it.”
    Patsy was his nurse today, a child-sized Vietnamese woman who swam in her XXS lavender scrubs. She waved at him from across the crowded room as if it were a party and she had finally caught his eye. “You’re here!” she said.
    “I’m here,” he said.
    She came to him, her black hair