Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories by Jennifer Crusie Read Free Book Online Page A

she became one of my favorite characters.

Just Wanted You To Know

    This story was written because someone in my MFA class wrote an epistolary story (a story told in letters) and I thought, “I want to try that” because it was such a great exercise in voice. I knew Debbie, Darla’s sister, was heading for a collision with Barbara, the Bank Slut, so I wrote the letter she’d write to her dumb-ass husband, Ronnie, after he left her for Barbara, complete with postscripts as two weeks pass and she works through what’s happened and where she’s headed.

    D ear Ronnie,
    I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t come home last weekend.
    I am trying to be calm and understanding here, but Darla told me yesterday after church that the reason you didn’t come home Saturday night—and I was so worried, Ronnie, I even drove out to the bowling alley to see if you were out there maybe having a heart attack in the parking lot, and then I sat up all night worrying myself to death, not knowing what had happened to you—was because you were staying with that Barbara Niedemeyer from the First National. She told me that, and all the breath just went right out from my body, and the whole world swung around. And then I remembered that all I needed to do was faint in Saint Mark’s vestibule and everybody in Tibbett would know, not to mention Mama, and Darla was holding my hand so tight that my wedding rings cut right into my skin, and the pain sort of brought me back. But Ronnie, it like to have broke my heart to hear news like that, especially from my own sister who had told me not to marry you the night before I did, but I stuck up for you then, and I’m trying to stick up for you now. But it’s hard, seeing as how you really did move in with Barbara, which I found out for sure when she called this morning from Toledo to say you’d be back in Tibbett in two weeks to pick up your things and the Mustang once the two of you got back from the vacation you’re taking on Mackinac Island. Twenty-six years of marriage, and you move in with a bank teller and go to Michigan with her and don’t even call to tell me yourself. I couldn’t hardly believe it, it hurt so much.
    I just sat there with the phone in my hand and thought about how much we’ve always been together. And then Darla came by to pick me up for work and said, “I have been trying to call you for half an hour and getting a busy signal, why are you holding that phone?” so I hung up. And then I told Darla that Barbara had called, and she started to say something, and I told her what I’d been thinking, like about the first time I saw you in kindergarten, and you gave me the celery from your lunch. Do you remember that? And then I told her about the time in third grade, when you kissed me on the merry-go-round, and I fell off and had to have eight stitches in my head, and you know the scar’s still there. And I reminded her about how you took me to the Spring Dance in the ninth grade, and we danced to “God Only Knows,” and you groped my chest even though I didn’t have that much then, and Mr. Johnson caught you and made you go home early, and Mama had a fit and told me I was going straight to hell, and I had to see Mrs. Pinckney on Monday so she could tell me about saving it for marriage, but I knew then I was going to marry you, Ronnie, so it didn’t matter. And I reminded her about how you took such good care of me in high school, telling me we’d better wait, and how you married me right away when we didn’t and Ronnie Junior was on the way, and how you cried the night he was born and said you were the happiest man in Tibbett, Ohio, and that you’d love me till you died even though Ronnie Jr. being born meant you had to go to work at your daddy’s Bowl-A-Rama instead of taking business courses at the Lima branch like you’d planned. I told her how much you wanted to go to college, Ronnie, don’t think I don’t remember, but I told her, too, that you never