Gun Lake by Travis Thrasher Read Free Book Online Page A

acting, what Collette was telling them.
    She probably had a right to tell them bad things about him. He knew she had a right to leave. But he just couldn’t get used to it. Every night for the past two weeks, he had come home expecting to see the lights on and Collette’s car in the driveway. He was prepared to come in and see the boys sleeping in their room, hear Collette in the bedroom getting ready for bed, and finally breathe that wonderful and frightening sigh of relief. He was still waiting to do that. Instead, he went home every night to a dark house and a silence that no amount of noise could muffle.
    “Have you talked to her?” Kay asked. “You oughta talk to her.”
    Apparently it wasn’t hard to read his mind.
    Don took a long drag and shook his head and let the smoke out. Collette would have complained about the cigarette and about that slight aftertaste on his breath.
Women are put on this earth to nag their husbands
, he thought. Even the estranged husbands they claim to no longer want to see.
    “She’ll calm down,” he said.
    Like she had the time he drove home late from the bar and accidentally broke the garage door. He
was
a little gone that night, although he could have sworn he pressed the button and saw the door begin to open before he drove in. The new garage door cost several hundred bucks, and touching up the chip in the garageframe required a trip to Home Depot and a Saturday afternoon. But it wasn’t that big of a deal. It had been a cheap door, anyway; the new one was better. And even though Collette went ballistic and took the boys and stayed a couple of days with her parents, she still came back. She always did. This time she was simply taking a little longer.
    He shifted and felt the cell phone on his belt clank against the wood. The cell phone for emergencies. All the horrific, dramatic emergencies that occupied his time here in the boondocks of central Michigan.
    He had wanted to be a cop ever since he was a kid. He remembered watching all those great cop shows—Dirty Harry,
The French Connection
, even Kojak and Baretta—and knowing he wanted to be the law. He could see himself walking around with a handgun and an attitude, catching bad guys, upholding the peace. But what happened if the peace was all around you and you couldn’t get away from it?
    Sure, there was the occasional drunken idiot on the lake. Some mild domestic disputes to handle. Or some obnoxious tourists in a cabin somewhere who needed to be calmed down. Traffic accidents and randy, goofy mishaps, like the time Wayne Murphy got hit in the head by a golf ball from the driving range close to his house. All petty stuff, lightweight stuff. In fact, the biggest pain in Don’s rear these days came from that smug, smiling, backstabbing Alex Connelly. What could you do if the biggest bad guy in your life happened to be your boss, the county sheriff who never came into the office? Who was more of a politician than a law officer. Who seemed dedicated to making sure Don never got any further in the department than where he already was.
    Don wanted more than that for his life. But what did “more” mean?
    Collette and the boys, to start with
.
    It was like poison ivy on your skin. He wanted to rub it raw, this feeling inside of him. But he couldn’t touch it. There was nothing he could do about it. And the more it remained untouched, the more it seemed to grow.
    He hated feeling desperate, feeling the need to call Collette and ask for her forgiveness. He wasn’t good with apologies, with the whole “I’m sorry, sweetie, and I love you, and I will change.” He knew Collette probably wanted to enroll him up to go see that doctor fella who used to be on the
Oprah
show. What was his name—Dr. Steve? Dr. Phil? Don could see Collette dragging him there and the doctor berating him in public, in front of a national audience.
    “How could you say you love your wife and then treat her like that?”
    That’s a crock
, Don