Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III Read Free Book Online Page B

blue, like robin’s eggs left exposed to the weather by their mother.
    “Is that good or bad?” He sits across from her. He can feel the sun’s warmth coming through the glass.
    “You look younger, but that’s not good or bad for me because I don’t give a shit.”
    “I don’t either.”
    “Really?”
    “I think so.”
    She’s smiling at him as if she’s known him longer than she has. This makes him feel comfortable which then makes him uncomfortable for feeling so comfortable. He’s tempted to stand and leave.
    “You two snuck in.” The waitress is a warm, fleshy face surrounded by gray hair, her hands gathering up the dirty plates, breadbasket, and half-empty glass. “Cocktails?”
    “Bloody Mary for me.”
    “Two,” Mark says.
    Lisa Schena is still smiling at him, and he can see she’s older than he thought, maybe ten years older than his daughter, closer to forty. This is good, but her smile is making him shy and he glances out the tinted window at the beach traffic, the white sand on the other side, the deep blue rim of ocean beyond that.
    “You’re a mess, aren’t you?”
    He looks back at her. “Probably. You?”
    “Just with what I told you last night.”
    He nods his head. His face grows warm, and he glances down at her tanned shoulders and upper arms.
    “You don’t remember shit, do you?”
    “I know we kissed.”
    “Yeah we did, but that was your idea.”
    “It was?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is that all right?”
    “Hey, I called you, didn’t I?”
    Mark looks back at the bar. The bearded man is gone, and on the TV above the listless fish, a woman is holding a bottle of floor cleaner, smiling earnestly into the camera. It’s the brand Laura has always used. He sees himself kneeling on the kitchen floor with a hammer. He’ll have to break the tiles completely before he can fix them.
    “I was talking about my son.”
    Words come back to Mark now, Lisa Schena’s voice from last night in his head. She was leaning against her Chevy sedan, her ankles and tanned thighs touching one another, that faded denim skirt and the way she crossed one arm under her breasts while she smoked. Wants to live with his fucking father.
    “He wants to live with his dad.”
    “Correct.”
    A busboy begins to wipe down their table, then set it. He is tall and slight. On the wrist of his left hand are the tattooed initials A.R . He disappears just as the waitress sets the Bloody Marys down in front of them, each with a stalk of celery too short for the glass, their ends just barely rising out of the vodka and tomato juice.
    “Oh shoot, you don’t have menus.”
    Then two bound menus are on the table between them, but Mark Welch and Lisa Schena leave them where they are. Without a toast they lift their glasses and drink, the vodka going into Mark like a mildly dangerous thought he ignores, and she begins to talk about her son. His name is Adam and he’s always been a difficult kid. “Never listened, always had to have time-outs and then I’d have to physically hold him to his little Fisher Price chair because he could never stay still. His father never did anything, and he’s just as bad anyway, can’t concentrate, can’t ever sit in one place unless it’s in front of a computer. He can’t hold a job now either, and he still has split custody but Adam wants to live with him full-time because there are no rules over there, or at least no boundaries, no expectations or respect for anyone else’s space, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve . . .”
    Mark sips and nods and listens. She is clearly a talker. It’s what she did the night before too, talked and talked and talked while he smoked her cigarettes and stared at her in the bruised neon from the bar, drunk and trying not to glance too much at the soft swell of her breasts or her tanned belly or that denim skirt he wanted to unzip and pull down over her hips, half-drunk but grateful for what was happening to him, this old blood descending to