Crash Diet by Jill McCorkle Read Free Book Online Page A

before he left. “We are not running a rest home. Uncle Ross left here to go to a retirement area, remember?” We , he said we are not running a rest home.
    “We’re not running anything right now,” she had said. “We haven’t rented a room in over three weeks.” And she had reluctantly allowed Mrs. Andler to pick her own room,knowing that there was a good chance that she’d pick the coolest, the darkest, her own personal favorite. Still, it was steady rent and Ruthie didn’t see what would be so terrible about having a few senior citizens around the place. So put up a few toilet bars, widen a doorway. What’s in Florida anyway?
    “You’re not listening,” he said, the muscle in his jaw tight. “You’re not even trying to see.”
    Now she thinks he meant more than that. Maybe he wanted her to see . Just a week before, he had teased her about a boy who had been in their high-school class, a boy who always sent a Christmas card and stopped by to say hello if he was passing through. “There’s a catch, Walter the Weird,” Jim said. “Eight feet tall and a hundred and twenty pounds.”
    “Oh, well,” she said and laughed. “And I suppose you’ve got some real looker after you.” And she teased him about a girl in the class a year ahead of them. “What about you and Loose Linda?” she asked. “What about that purple sequin dress she wore to the prom? Clashed with her orange hair something awful.” Now Linda runs a local jewelry store and has fingernails long enough to rival those of Howard Hughes. She reminded him of that, too, all the while seeing a picture in her mind of the prom their junior year: Jim on the dance floor with Linda, her standing in front of the refreshments with smart Walter. Walter was talking about how he wanted to have a single room at the Universityso that he wouldn’t have to make compromises about his study time, and Ruthie was thinking about how she’d like to march out on the dance floor and grab Linda by the throat.
    “At least Walter is a CPA. I hear he buys his wife something extravagant every single April. For all I know he buys it from Linda.” There was a moment of silence and she read it as the same old sore spot, education, so she continued talking, something she had always done well. “Don’t you remember that prom?” she asked. “You came over and asked me to dance while Linda went to the bathroom?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You asked me out for the very next night, said it was dumb that we had broken up to begin with. You did all that right there under Linda’s long nose.” She thought they had both gotten a good laugh, a playful exchange that led to a kiss and a hug, a long hard hug, his day-old beard rubbing her cheek. Now she thinks he pulled her close so she couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t see the dishonesty. Now she thinks that he was trying to prepare her, trying to make her think about herself and what kind of man she would attract, make her stop and ask herself if she was still attractive.
    “I saw you .” That’s what she had said that night when Jim tried to offer an explanation. The ends of his hair werestill wet from the tub; for all she knew the woman (he had called her Barbara) was still down there in number fifteen, a damp naked body stretched out on the sheets Ruthie had changed that very morning.
    Ruthie, drawn in some strange way—maybe by a thought of those wonderful nights they had spent in the Honeymoon Tub—had stepped from the office into the empty parking lot. It was unseasonably pleasant for a night in July and she had turned slowly into the breeze, the Budget Motel across the highway already dark and boarded up, the lights in her own house glowing where her mother sat reading to the kids. The window to their bedroom was open, and she could see the sheers blown to one side, showing a perfect rectangle of darkness. She imagined Jim sitting in a school desk, his long legs stretched on a linoleum floor while he listened to someone