Crash Diet by Jill McCorkle Read Free Book Online

when the teakettle whistled, Frieda shrieked after it, a high wailing Wooooooooooooo which sent Rodney into a fit of laughter; it sent all of them into a fit of laughter. So how had it happened?
    How can you be laughing one day and crying the next, and how had the years taken such a sudden turn? How had 301 died such a quick tragic death, and when had Jim ever had the time to meet someone else, and not just to meet her but to court her, to woo her, to sleep with her right there in number fifteen while just twenty yards away she had sat under the fluorescent light of the office and waited for the check-in that never came, waited for the phone call that would reserve the entire motel? These were the stories she was telling him, and he was telling her, these stories about how people would get tired of the sameness of the interstate, tired of those SOUTH OF THE BORDER and MYRTLE BEACH signs, how the people would come back. Why, any day now, old 301 would be buzzing. And in the midst of all of this futile optimism, she had been completely blind to what was happening. She had fallen for the very trick that she and Jim had used on her mother; he was in room fifteen, right there under her nose.
    “Watch this,” Frieda calls now and does a cannonball, arms hugging her knees as she slaps into the water andsprays her pale giggling friend who clings to the ladder. Ruthie wishes that Rodney and Frieda would ask her some questions. What happened? Will he come back? Is it your fault that he left? Instead, she has heard them whispering back and forth and she tries not to think of what Rodney, in the vocabulary of Malcolm, is telling Frieda. They will get a divorce. We will never see him again. He doesn’t love us anymore. He wanted to sell the motel and go to school years ago but she talked him into staying .
    Ruthie keeps thinking she needs some advice, an opinion, but is afraid to seek it because everyone in town will hear the news as fast as she opens her mouth and there will be desperately lonely people knocking on her door; nothing like a good bit of domestic dirt to shake up a ghost town or to lend hope to the other singles in need. Once she and Jim had spent a whole Friday evening sitting by the pool with a psychiatrist and his wife who were on their way to see the man’s family in Miami. Ruthie had been afraid to talk at first. Neither the man’s voice nor his wife’s carried a trace of an accent, but it was more that she was afraid he would read something in her every word. Finally, after everyone except her had had a couple of glasses of wine and an hour of idle conversation about the difference between a palmetto and a palm, she got used to the fact that he was as normal as Jim. She was six months pregnant with Frieda at the time and had Rodney clinging to her legs. She had asked the doctor lots of questions about bringingin a new baby, how to make it all easy on Rodney, while the doctor’s wife and Jim talked about astronomy, pointing out this or that constellation or planet. After another hour of chatting, Jim had gone in and gotten an old telescope that he hadn’t used in years, and the two of them sat there searching the sky. He had talked about college, what he planned to take when he finally got there. Maybe Jim had always been looking. That’s what Ruthie should have asked the psychiatrist. What are the signs of a husband about to leave?
    “Did you see me, Mom?” Frieda calls, thumbing the back of her bathing suit where it rode up with the impact of her landing. Ruthie nods and then waves to Mrs. Andler, who is sitting outside of the Blue Moon room in another of the worn-out lawn chairs. Mrs. Andler moved in when she decided at eighty that her house in town was much too large for her. Ruthie gave her a good deal when she moved in a month ago and has yet to have the nerve to approach her about whether she sees this as a temporary or permanent thing. “You can’t start this, Ruthie,” Jim said just two days