Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III Read Free Book Online

last light of the afternoon came through the side kitchen window and lay across their hands and plates and beer and wine. Mark glanced at his mother. She was chewing thoughtfully, her eyes on the lifetime ago in her head, and even though there were those lines etched around her mouth and cheeks, her hair so thin he could see her scalp, he saw her again as a young woman, her drunk husband dead and gone, all those years ahead of her working as a secretary at Leary’s Insurance company downtown, coming home each night to cook him and Claire a hot meal they would then share at the mahogany table in the dark dining room that smelled like old drapes.
    “But as much as you wanted that A, you would never ask for help.” She turned to him. “Remember that?”
    “Most men don’t, Ma.”
    “Well that’s a shame. It is.”
    In the corner of her lip was a dot of mayonnaise, her lipstick smeared just above it. She looked her age then, and Mark wanted to reach over and squeeze her shoulder. He kept eating.
    He’s hungry now. Or his body is. This distant rumble in his gut. Greasy fried chicken would do. Maybe that KFC just past the Walmart. But he sees the small plastic table he’d eat at, a loud family nearby, and the thought depresses him. He’s passing racks of C-clamps now, bar clamps, hooks and chains and bungee cords.
    Just before the shelves of fasteners and adhesive is a barrel of threaded pipe, gray and an inch and a half wide and four feet long. They are just like the one that lies in the trunk of Mark’s car, and he grasps one. It is cool and hard, the sure diameter of it fitting nicely inside his fist.
    He sees himself swinging it into the bald head of Frank Harrison Jr., caving it in like a watermelon, the sheet pulled to Laura’s shoulders in the Marriot’s king-size bed, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream.
    But this image seems to come not from his life, but from a movie Mark saw as a boy, and his hand lets go of the pipe and he keeps walking. How exhausted he is. Soon he finds the wood glue, a contractor’s grade in a long plastic bottle he drops into his cart. He moves through busy people and their busy sounds and he finds the tile section, its various tools that apparently make any flooring job easier: wet saws and rubber gloves, grout floats and sponges and big plastic buckets. His stomach is an empty cavern. There’s a throbbing in his forehead. Is he really going to do this? Take all this home and get on his hands and knees to repair the floor he no longer even treads? And does he even know how? Most of the process seems to be common sense, and there are directions on the side of the mortar bag, but will they be enough?
    He begins to lift and drop items into his cart when something buzzes inside his shorts pocket and he nearly slaps at it. He pulls his cell phone free. He squints at it. It is a local number he does not recognize. It could be work, though his new deadline is months away and he is surprised at his disappointment it is not Laura who is calling.
    He watches himself press the talk button, “This is Mark Welch.”
    “Yeah well, this is Lisa Schena.”
    He stares at the stack of mortar bags. His stomach growls. He feels caught in a test of some kind, one he did not know was coming. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
    “Not yet.” Her voice is young, her tone playful. Then he tastes last night’s menthol cigarette, his erection pressed against his pants against the drunk woman’s bare belly.
    “From The Tap?”
    “Probably.”
    “Probably?” He finds himself smiling at this. “You don’t know for sure?”
    “No, you don’t know for sure. Tell me about this Lisa.”
    “She hates rap music—”
    “And?”
    “And she’s—”
    “What?”
    “She’s very—”
    “Hungry.”
    “She is?”
    “Yes. You promised her a meal.”
    “I did?”
    “Mark Welch did. This is you , isn’t it?”
    “I think so.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “Not lately, no.” Mark’s breathing