Last Summer by Holly Chamberlin Read Free Book Online Page B

pay was decent and the job afforded her health insurance, which sometimes seemed more essential than the salary, like when you looked at what it cost to pay for a policy entirely on your own. But the hours were long and a few members of the office staff were incredibly incapable, kept on only because they were somehow related to the president of the company, Trip King, who wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist himself. Still, she was thankful to have a job in the first place, especially with two children to support and little if any help from her ex-husband. Peter never had two nickels to rub together, and his asking for a loan and her refusing to give it was pretty much a monthly ritual. And on top of his fiscal irresponsibility, there was his general inability to be there for his children. His inability or his simple lack of interest or maybe even both.
    Frannie sat up and adjusted the pillows behind her. How long had it been since she had replaced the pillows? She couldn’t remember, which probably meant that it was time for new ones. These were probably full of dead skin and dust mites. Next time she found herself in South Portland—which could be quite some time; summer was her employer’s busiest season and some weeks she found herself going in to the office on Saturday—she would stop in Marshalls or Home-Goods and see what was on sale.
    She lay back down and sighed. Yes, Peter was useless in a situation like this, a family crisis. At least, he had been useless to date, and she didn’t expect that to change. He wasn’t a bad man, not really, just insensitive to emotional nuances, and also, she had to admit this, he was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. And there was the cheating thing, too. Peter would never agree to go to therapy—not that he had the money for treatment—so Frannie had no idea if he was indeed a “sex addict.” But he certainly had exhibited some seriously wayward behavior in the days of their marriage, and she wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he was still sowing his wild oats at the age of thirty-seven. Some women didn’t mind a premature paunch and missing front teeth. Frannie knew she was being mean—like she was physically perfect!—but at that moment she didn’t much care. She would admit such unkind thoughts to Father William when she next went to confession. But Father William had known Peter, albeit not very well. She doubted that deep in his heart he would condemn her for not thinking of her ex-husband with charity. Father William might be a priest, but he was a human being first.
    Adjusting the pillows had not helped her to relax. And thinking about her ex-husband wasn’t helping either, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
    To tell herself she should have known better than to marry the dubiously charming local boy with the spotty reputation didn’t help matters. The fact was that she had married Peter when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-two. The following year she had given birth to Megan Christine. Almost eight years later, Peter Jr. had come along, unplanned, an accident, but welcomed. By then, the marriage was a sham, held together only by Frannie’s willpower and the firm belief that divorce was fundamentally wrong and should be avoided at all costs. And then things had gotten really bad, with Peter losing his job and maxing out their credit card and taking up with a much younger woman with a drug habit, and reason and the instinct for survival had triumphed over her church’s noble but unrealistic teachings. When Petey was barely two, Frannie kicked his father out of the house he was failing to pay for or maintain and began life as a single parent, which, in a way, she had been all along.
    Maybe that was why Meg had acted so irresponsibly, Frannie thought now. Maybe she just hadn’t been a good enough single parent. In all her reading she had yet to come across any study that identified kids from single-parent homes as necessarily more likely to bully