Fangs Out by David Freed Read Free Book Online Page B

as a means of retaliation, you’re mistaken. If anything, Logan, I’m employing a classic anticipatory coping mechanism to blunt what I perceive is your apparent reticence.”
    “I have no idea what you just said, but I do have a suggestion.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “I think we should just sleep together. See how those coping mechanisms work.”
    “I’m dealing with someone who’s still clearly in junior high.”
    “Ah, yes, the old junior high scenario. OK,” I said, “you be the viceprincipal and I’ll play the unruly student who gets sent to your office in need of some serious discipline. It could be wildly entertaining.”
    I waited for her to laugh. I might’ve even settled on a polite chuckle, but there was only silence.
    “I just need a little time to synthesize things in my head, that’s all,” she said after a long moment.
    At that moment, part of me wanted to fire a Sidewinder missile into whatever remained salvageable between us, to say something irretrievably hurtful and blow up the whole ugly mess, so that we would both have reason to walk away for good. The other part, arguably the better part, realized that when it came to my ex-wife, I was incapable of pulling that emotional pin, and probably always would be.
    “If you want to retreat to neutral corners,” I said, “so be it.”
    “I’ll call you, Logan.”
    “You do that, Savannah.”
    Click.
    Something churned up bitter and hot from under my sternum and burned the back of my throat. I swallowed it down and started through the backyard, toward my truck, which was parked out on the street.
    “Bubeleh!”
    Mrs. Schmulowitz was sitting at her kitchen table, wearing her big round Liza Minnelli reading glasses, motioning me excitedly through the window to join her.
    “I have something unbelievably exciting to tell you,” she said as I walked in.
    “You found Kiddiot?”
    “Not yet.”
    I didn’t mask my worry well.
    “He’ll turn up. You’ll see. I’ll make a nice brisket. That always gets him.”
    “It always gets me.”
    “So tell me something I don’t know.”
    Her table was littered with color brochures from various cosmetic surgeons featuring photos of their handiwork—smiling young women in bikinis with radiant faces and flawless bodies. Rancho Bonita was loaded with them.
    “So what’s the exciting thing you had to tell me, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”
    She beamed. “I’m getting a tummy tuck!”
    “Women your age don’t get their tummies tucked, Mrs. Schmulowitz. They get hip replacements and the senior discount at Denny’s.”
    “Is that so? Well, how many women my age can do this ?” She pushed back from the table, bent down with her palms planted on the floor and proceeded to do a handstand.
    “I might get a little Botox while I’m at it, too, maybe a boob lift, the whole schmear,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, the blood draining to her head, her spine crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies. “Not many eligible bachelors left out there in my demographic. You can’t be too competitive these days, you know.”
    “You don’t need cosmetic surgery, Mrs. Schmulowitz. You’re perfect just the way you are.”
    She blew me a kiss standing upside down, then suggested delicately—to the extent that Mrs. Schmulowitz was capable of doing anything delicately—that I might want to think about having a bit of work done on my own increasingly furrowed features.
    “Don’t get me wrong, Bubelah, you’re a total hotsy totsy,” she said, “but, let’s face it, none of us is getting any younger, with the possible exception of Joan Rivers. Now, you get a little filler, that schnoz of yours straightened out, oy gevalt, we’re talking total chick magnet.”
    I might’ve taken her advice seriously, especially when it came to my sneezer which, no thanks to football and the occasional fist, resembled not so much a nose anymore as it did a geometry equation. But the dents and wrinkles one collects along the way chronicle a record