Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories by Debra Dean Read Free Book Online

artifacts no longer used but of some dubious value. Her mother was paring down; she had sold the house and bought a condo in Durham.
    "What about these?" Elaine asked, holding up a pair of cow salt-and-pepper shakers she remembered from her childhood.
    Her mother gave them hardly a glance. "Goodwill."
    "How about this?" Wrapped in yellowed tissue was a ceramic crèche that had appeared on the front hall table every December for decades.
    "Goodwill."
    And so on and so on, through boxes of old vacation slides and photo albums, a croquet set, canning jars, souvenir ashtrays and spoon rests, a rock tumbler for polishing agates, high school yearbooks, the linen christening gown she and her brothers had been baptized in, the old brown sleeping bags with deer and ducks on the flannel lining.
    And then her father's metal tackle box. Elaine found it in the growing sprawl of To Go items. Each tray was neatly labeled in her father's hand and filled with flies and hooks and flashers, spools of thread and bits of line.
    "You're not really thinking of throwing this away?" Elaine urged.
    "I can't imagine what I'm going to do with fishing tackle. Somebody else might as well get some good out of it."
    "It's not as though you're going into the Witness Protection Program, Mom," Elaine snapped. "You don't have to leave it all behind."
    "I'm trying to do you a favor, missy. When I die, you won't have to feel guilty about throwing things away. I only wish my own mother had done this. Do you know I found boxes and boxes of used lightbulbs in the attic? All the filaments burned out. She hadn't thrown out a lightbulb in twenty years."
    "There's a difference."
    "It's all just stuff," her mother pronounced, and that was that.
    So Elaine ended up feeling guilty about the boxes of rescued history she carried to her car at the end of the day. It was mostly sentimental junk; still, her mother's breezy disregard prickled her nerves. She had spent the day trying to be an adult and failing, and now she was tired and grimy. A quick stop at the store, then she was going to go home, make herself a grilled cheese sandwich, take a shower, and go to bed.
     
    And that was when she saw her ex. At that moment, Neil was sailing his cart through the brightly lit produce section, checking a list against the rows of polished and misted fruit, squinting in concentration, his tongue thrust into his cheek. Typically, he was oblivious to everything except the task in front of him. He threw a dozen oranges into a bag and then strode to a pyramid of corn, where he began ripping back husks and tossing the imperfect ears aside.
    She noticed others watching him, too. He was still handsome, but not movie-star handsome. In photographs, he might easily be overlooked. But people gravitated to Neil. His confidence was magnetic. He was a pied piper, at the forefront of countless fads that had washed across Eastlake over the years. She had seen it happen again and again. Neil had been the first person in their neighborhood to take up cross training and the first one to throw it over for free weights. Later there was Rollerblading and touring the wine countries by bicycle.
    When they were young, Elaine had been afraid he would die of a heart attack before he was thirty and leave her widowed with two small children. She had never known anyone with so much energy. He might get called in on an emergency in the middle of the night, and still see two dozen patients the next day. Then he'd come home, take the edge off with a five-mile run before dinner, and
she
was the one who was exhausted, having spent the day following a toddler around the house. In his wake, she always felt tired and inferior. Eventually, she had drifted to the rear of the conga line and been replaced by a younger, sturdier model who needed less sleep.
    Already, there was a knot forming around the bin of corn.
    She didn't feel up to talking to him tonight, so she decided to skip the tomatoes she had come in for and headed