Envy the Night by Michael Koryta Read Free Book Online Page B

all. It’s Friday, and we got some nice work in today, and you’ve done a good job this afternoon. So go on and get out of here. Enjoy the weekend.”
    She walked away as the first flush of gratitude mixed with shame crept onto his cheeks.

6
    __________
    G etting out a little early on a Friday was no reason to disrupt your normal postwork routine, so Jerry drove directly to Kleindorfer’s Tap Room, had himself a bar stool and a Budweiser before the clock hit five. Carl, the bartender, took one look at him coming through the door and asked if the Stafford girl had finally fired him. Jerry didn’t bother to dignify that with a verbal response, electing instead to go with a simple but clear gesture.
    It was early enough that the room was almost empty, a couple of out-of-towners drinking Leinenkugel in a booth, nobody at the bar except Jerry, nothing on the TV except poker. Give it a few minutes, they’d switch over to that show where the black guy and the white guy argued about sports, neither of them knowing a damn thing to start with. Jerry and Carl tended to have better ideas than those two.
    Jerry sipped his beer and watched the muted poker game and simmered over Carl’s comment. It had been a joke between friends, no offense meant, but it riled him anyhow. Not so much at Carl for saying at it, more at his own life for the circumstances that produced the line. Jokes about working for Nora were constant. Could hardly get through a day without hearing one. She’d been there almost a year now. Showed up from Madison dressed to the nines, walked into the body shop wearing jewelry and perfume and with her long fingernailspolished and told Jerry she was the new boss. Wouldn’t just own the shop, she intended to
run
the shop.
    The afternoon Bud Stafford had his stroke, it had been Jerry who found him slumped under a Honda, his shirt smeared with primer from the fall onto the hood. Jerry knew it was bad; his hands shook while he dialed for the ambulance. At the time, though, he’d seen two possible outcomes—Bud would die, or he wouldn’t. The end result, this half-death, was a twist Jerry hadn’t considered. Nora’d called a few days after the stroke to ask him to keep the shop going while Bud was in the hospital. A week after that, she was in town and in charge. Jerry had tolerated it, because he figured Bud would come back. That’s what she kept telling him, insisting to him. Bud was going to be fixed up, and then he’d be back and she’d be gone, back down to Madison, finish up graduate school in
art history,
of all things.
    He still couldn’t get his mind around that. Bud had been cutting that girl checks for years, putting her through school. Reasonable thing to do, providing the kid would accomplish something, walk out of there with a piece of paper telling the world she was useful, an engineer or an architect or a doctor, but Bud could never say what the hell she was going to do. Most practical man Jerry’d ever seen walk the earth would just shake his head and smile and say, “She’s a damn smart girl. I’ll let her learn, and when she’s done with that, she’ll do something big. Guarantee it, my man. She’ll do something big.”
    Well, she wasn’t doing shit that Jerry could see except bitching a blue streak about things she didn’t understand and losing them business. End of every month, Nora would tell him that they’d kept the bill collectors at bay again, like it was something to be proud of. Didn’t realize those bills were paid only through a sort of pie-in-the-sky expectation that Bud would be back eventually. It kept a meager supply of work coming in. And, Jerry had to admit, kept him in the shop. So who was he to criticize the customers who did the same thing?
    Ten, maybe fifteen minutes had passed while Jerry brooded—enough for a completed Budweiser and the order of a fresh one—when the door opened and closed behind him. Regulars finally showing up, he thought, until the new