Mendocino and Other Stories by Ann Packer Read Free Book Online

totally up to me. Do you realize we've never washed our wedding china?” She waved at a stack of the formal, flowery plates; he didn't point out that they'd also never used them. “I don't mind,” she said. “I like things to be clean. But you just ought to realize…” Her voice trailed off and she turned back to the sink, plunged her hands into the water, and began to sob harder.
    And here was his mistake. He'd said, “Realize what?” He'd stood behind her without touching her and said, “Realize what?” And that evening he asked her again and again, until she finally told him to stop asking, she was fine.
That
was where they'd taken their wrong turn: into a place where you couldn't tell the difference between polite and happy, to this point, this dry hillside, this separation. When it was so simple, what he should have done: taken her in his arms and said, Darling, darling, please don't, please forgive me for whatever it is I've done to upset you, please, you're my beautiful girl—
my dahling, lovely gehl
, like a character in an old movie—and they'd be wonderful now; they'd be fine.
    HE FOUND HER back at the car, looking over her exquisite sketches—he loved her sketches, had always loved them. “You're very good at what you do,” he said.
    Once she would have said, happily, “Really?” Now she laughed a little dismissively and said, “So are you”—and he wondered what it was she thought he was good at.
    “Charlie?” she said. “It's getting a little crowded at Cynthia's.”
    Cautiously, hopefully, he nodded.
    “She hasn't said so, but I think she'd like her privacy back.”
    “It's a small apartment.”
    “Here's the thing—Kiro's offered me his carriage house for a few months.” She looked at him, then quickly looked away.
    “Kiro?” Charlie said. “This is all about Kiro? Jesus, Linda—too bad I'm not some fastidious little Japanese architect, is that it? He probably doesn't even have any hair on his chest.” He slammed his fist against the car. “I can't believe you.”
    Charlie had met Kiro once; he remembered him as a small man in a double-breasted suit—a tiny man, really, who smoked tiny black cigarettes and drank a vile drink called a negroni: gin and sweet vermouth and Campari or something. Kiro's philosophy of life was probably cryptic and pretentious, his carriage house full of smooth black stones and thousand-dollar orchids, no furniture. She could sleep on the stones and eat the orchids, and then they'd see.
    “Charlie, listen,” Linda said. “This isn't about sex, I promise. Kiro is just my friend, my very—my very kind friend. He's not the issue.”
    “What's the issue, Linda?”
    “I just”—she hesitated—“need some space right now.”
    That word again. He turned away from her, and because there was nothing else to do he got in the car. He watched her standing there, pretending to be looking at her sketches, her beautiful sketches. His
wife.
    She gathered her things together and got in next to him.
    “Would it help,” he said. “Would it help if I got an office job? You know, where I had to wear a suit and tie every day?”
    “Charlie, God. Dress up and play a part? That's not how it works.” She sighed and leaned against the door. “You're wasting yourself.”
    He started the car. She had never actually said it before, and while a sour little voice in him was saying, “No, I'm not; I'm
saving
myself,” the rest of him had risen to a strange plateau where he felt oddly empowered—he was back on the hill, watching her from a great height.
    HOW COULD A grown man with any self-respect sit in the emergency room waiting area of a major city hospital and cry? If he hadn't been in so much pain Charlie might have asked himself any number of questions, but as it was he was concentrating on staying as still as possible. He wasn't actually crying so much as tearing up at each involuntary movement of his neck and shoulders, which caused him more anguish than