Hooked by Catherine Greenman Read Free Book Online

salad. Salad was the first thing you started to come around on, if I remember correctly. Salad with little cherry tomatoes.”
    He looked me up and down, arms stiffly at his sides, and it was like I could read his mind: she needs to lose a few pounds. After the divorce I’d become Mom’s property and therefore vaguely distasteful to him.
    “Let’s eat,” he said, steering us back to the table.
    “So where do you get the lobsters?” Will asked. “Do you guys have a trap out there?” He elbowed toward the water.
    “No, it’s illegal now, you need a license. Thea, why are we eating salad off ashtrays?”
    “What?” I asked. “I thought they were salad plates.”
    “These were Nana’s and they’re actually ashtrays,” Dad said, picking up his plate and holding it at his chest. “This gives you an indication of how much they used to smoke. They would lay these out all over the house during cocktail parties.”
    “They really do look like plates,” Will mused. “Were you ever a smoker, Ted?”
    Dad nodded, mashing his napkin across his mouth. “Two packs a day at one point. I’d somehow resisted temptation all through college. I raced crew and played lacrosse, so I took that very seriously. But when I met Thea’s mother, actually, that’s when I took it up.”
    “Right, all her fault,” I chimed in.
    “I’m not saying that, Thea,” he said, looking at me pointedly. “No one to blame but myself on that front.” He pushed his bowl of empty lobster shells away from him, toward the glass-enclosed candle in the middle of the table. “I think I got caught up in all the headiness of it, you know, the parties, the scene, all that. They all smoked.”
    “What brand?” I asked. I pictured him slouched in his chair in the living room, drunk.
    “Camel Lights, whatever was around. Anyway, needless to say, I hope you don’t fall down that little rabbit hole,” he said, rattling his glass of ice and draining it of water. “Nicotine addiction is no prize. It’s been, what … almost a decade? And still, I’d kill for a cigarette.”
    “Really?” I laughed.
    “Oh, absolutely,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Absolutely. It never really went away for me. And sometimes at work …” His voice trailed off.
    “What about a drink?” I blurted, surprising myself. His drinking was more of a taboo subject for me than sex. To bring it up was not just embarrassing but dangerous. I still hadpervasive, floating fears that he’d start again. And somewhere in my head I believed that if he started again, it would do him in. Whether it was true or not, that’s what I believed.
    “That too,” he said, his face stiffening, closing up. He watched Will’s reaction, gauging how much I’d told him.
    “I could see how they’d go hand in hand,” Will said.
    Dad nodded, chuckled skittishly. “Not too clearly, I hope.”
    “How did you stop?” Will asked.
    “The same way I stopped drinking,” he said quickly. “I put my mind to it.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his leg.
    “Was it hard?” Will asked, wide-eyed, encouraging. I could hear it in his voice. He was digging for color, but I knew he wouldn’t get any. “Did you have, like, withdrawal symptoms?”
    “With the drinking I did, sure,” he said. “The smokes were more of a habit. But like any smoker, I guess, a beloved one.”
    “What do you miss most?” Will asked.
    “What, about smoking?”
    “Or the drinking, or both.”
    Dad arched his eyebrows skeptically. “You’re extremely interested.…”
    “I just mean a successful guy like you, you know, you had these … demons that you conquered, so to speak.” Will sat back and crossed his legs, jiggling his foot on his thigh. “The partying, you know, you and Fiona, boozing it up, getting high, it seems very glamorous from where I’m sitting.”
    Dad looked at Will carefully. It was definitely crossing the line into too-personal territory and we all knew it, but