Love May Fail by Matthew Quick Read Free Book Online Page B

wonder how many inches separate my two middle fingers that are resting on her shockingly thick bra strap.
    I guess five inches, and then—in my mind—tell myself to stop crying.
    “Can I take you to breakfast?” I ask.
    “Why are you crying, Portia?”
    “Let’s have breakfast at the diner.”
    “Now?”
    “Yeah. Right now.”
    “Can I go like this? Where are we going? Which diner? Who will be there? How can we even know? Is it a safe time to go? Maybe we should wait until there are less people there. I don’t know, Portia. I just don’t know.”
    She’s in the pink sweat suit she wears every day, brown stains floating like continents in a pastel sea of cheap, worn cotton. She has at least fifty different pink sweat suits stacked in her bedroom, which she purchases whenever she gets up enough courage to take the bus to Walmart and finds a pink sweat suit on sale for less than $9.99, which is the maximum she will pay. All of her extra pink sweat suits still have the tags attached, because she wears the same damn one over and over again, and wants to have the option of taking the extra ones back should she ever run low on money. She has receipts for pink sweat suits from the Clinton administration. And yes, she and the entire house reek.
    Mother goes to the Acme across the street once a week at 9:43 on Tuesday night, because that’s when the fewest cars are in the parking lot. She counts the cars from the living room window obsessively and keeps a chart. Tuesdays at 9:43 has been the best time to go shopping for some time now, unless it’s changed since the last time we spoke on the phone. She always diligently reports the number of cars in the Acme parking lot, whether I ask or not, and I never do. She has a record going back several decades. It’s a shame there isn’t a market for this sort of data. She’d be the Bill Gates of food-store parking statistics.
    “If you really love me,” I say, making a preemptive strike toher Achilles heel, “you’ll go to breakfast with me right down the street at the Crystal Lake Diner. We’ll have waffles maybe. You could use a walk. We need to get you outside more. You look sort of pasty.”
    “A walk! In the daylight! They’ll see me! They have small planes now with cameras. Drones, they’re called! I saw this on TV. The drones can shoot you dead too! Anywhere in the world!”
    “The government is not watching you, Mom. They could care less about you, believe me. The US government only cares about rich people! Last time I checked you’ve never lived in Faddonfield.”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Mom taps the soft flesh of her right palm against her forehead. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t vote for Obama . And not because he’s black either. But they have records! And now that we have a black president—it’s hard to trust anything these days.”
    “You haven’t voted for anyone in three decades, white or black.”
    “They’ll shoot me for being unpatriotic then!”
    “Listen, Mom.” I lift her chin with my index finger until our eyes meet. “I promise it’ll be okay if you eat breakfast with me at the diner. I promise.”
    “We could eat here!”
    “We can leave the house and be okay. I swear. Do this for me, and I won’t throw anything away for at least a week. You can rest easy for seven entire days. And a week is long. I might lose interest in cleaning the house by the end of it. I won’t touch a thing. You’ll have my word.”
    “This is my house! My father gave it to me !”
    “Mom. Focus. Breakfast. At. The. Diner,” I say, karate-chopping the periods into the air between us, thinking about how Ken and I have paid her taxes and debt for the last seven years just so she won’t lose this wonderful little shithole. We’ve actually prepaid everything for the next few years too—taxes, cable, water, electricity, everything. Less than Ken spends on his monthly cigar and scotch supply.
    “I don’t know,” she