Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online Page B

mean, when the spirit hits you ... Right? There's no time to lose."
    "I figured it was money," I said, keeping my voice even. "That was the only thing I could come up with that made sense."
    There was a long silence. Then finally, I sensed the assault was over. She chewed on her lip and I could see in her eyes that she'd grudgingly called cease-fire. "You want some coffee?" she said.
    We sat at the table in the alcove. She gave me coffee in a mug with a slogan printed on it: "I'm having my coffee, so fuck off!" She brought one of the pictures to the table too, one of the framed photos from the mantelpiece. It looked like it was taken for a high-school yearbook. It was posed and glossy, gauzy and sentimental.
    The girl—Serena—didn't look like Lauren much. She had lighter hair and softer, rounder features, sweeter features than Lauren had ever had. A small, pouting, uncertain mouth. Serious brown eyes—even in the photo, I could look into them and see that she was hurting and lost.
    "Men suck," said Lauren. She had a mug of her own with a slogan of her own: "Party Girl." She had a fresh cigarette going. "They really do. I mean, when I got pregnant, Carl was all, like, 'Oh, you're so beautiful, you're having my baby, I'll never stop loving you.' It was like we were in some commercial-free hour of crap music on AM radio. Then he hangs around long enough for Serena to love him. You know, girls—they just love their daddies. And he's, like, a Wall Street guy, so we had money, and I got to stay home and take care of her, so she got used to that, too. And I got used to it."
    "You married a Wall Street guy?" I said.
    "I met him on his day off. He was cooler then."
    "Ah."
    "Anyway, it was right after you and I broke up, so I was on the rebound, I guess. But he was nice to me, too. I gotta say that for him, to be fair. Men suck, but at least Carl was nice for a while before he sucked."
    I hid my corkscrew smile in my coffee. It was pretty easy to guess where this story was going. A successful young guy like Carl with a sharp-tongued harpy like Lauren. It was only a question of what he'd leave her for: young tail, freedom, peace and quiet, the right to hang on to his own money. Or maybe just some girl who knew how to string together ten minutes of tenderness and respect and admiration to take his mind off his itching dick.
    As it happened, it was a little of everything. The young tail came first. A girl at the office. Then, another girl someplace else. And so on until Lauren caught him one too many times, and it ended with him slamming the door in her screaming face as he stormed out. After that, he had a few party years on his own, so that took care of the freedom. And now he had the peace and quiet off in Arizona somewhere, living with a Life Partner type, the two of them running a homegrown investment firm together: lots of money and no kids.
    "Fucking son of a bitch!" Lauren tore smoke out of her cigarette with her teeth. "He set this mad-dog lawyer on me. They threatened to have me declared an unfit mother, take Serena away from me. I ended up, I hardly even got child support—which he hardly ever pays, anyway. Never comes to see her. Sends her fucking birthday cards. When she was little, she used to sleep with them under her pillow. How pitiful is that?" I had set the picture of the girl down on the table. Lauren picked it up now, looked into her daughter's face. "I thought she'd gotten over it," she said plaintively. "I thought she was doing great."
    Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I thought. Single moms. Divorcé dads. They always think the kids are doing great. Cathy and I hear it all the
time, in church, in our children's schools.
How're the kids doing? They're doing great!
They're always doing great. Until they're not doing great, until suddenly they're in rehab or on medication or off at some special camp for suicidal teens or whatever. Divorce fucks kids up.
    "What happened?" I asked her.
    She laid the photo down again. "She's