Nine Women by Shirley Ann Grau Read Free Book Online

Iced or hot?”
    “Iced this time of year. It’s nowhere near cold yet.”
    “And I didn’t have to wear my coat, huh?” Mary Margaret called after her.
    “She don’t like to think winter’s coming,” her father said. “She stands out in the yard and she don’t see any signs in the leaves.”
    “I don’t much like it either.”
    “My luck’s better in winter,” he said. “A lot better. Why do you suppose that is?”
    There were long pauses now. Mary Margaret could feel herself slowing down, fitting into the pace of this house. At work she was efficient and quick and bustling, heels rattling on the office floors. She drove the highways like a racer, changing lanes, brake lights flashing, impatient, restless. In this house, she found silences appearing between her words, comfortable silences, like soft beds to rest your thoughts on.
    “Florida,” he said. “I do great at Calder. And Louisiana.”
    “I don’t know why, Pa.”
    Her mother came back with three glasses of iced tea rattling on the metal tray. “No lemon this week. Said it was the truck strike or something like that.”
    “It’s okay, Ma. I don’t really care about the lemon.”
    “You always take lemon.” Her mother picked up her work again.
    Her father twirled the ice in his glass. His nails were dirt-rimmed, he never was able to scrub them clean. “Yeah,” he said. “All my luck’s in the south. Like the day at Gulfstream when they disqualify the winner and they hand me thirty-eight dollars and forty cents. You remember that, honey?”
    Her mother’s name was Christine, but he never called her that. Always honey. Maybe it had something to do with the long dead husband and friend, George Maley.
    Her mother nodded absentmindedly, counting her threads. A faint odor of cooking drifted into the room. She had turned on the oven while making the tea. Tuna fish casserole. They always had tuna fish casserole before the novena on Wednesdays.
    “I like those southern tracks. None of that skidding around on the ice like at Aqueduct.”
    She drank her iced tea slowly. Her mother had added orange juice in place of the missing lemon.
    “Sometimes my luck’s rotten though. Like Amato turning mule on me.”
    That caught her attention. “I didn’t know that, Pa.”
    “He muled. Owed me a hundred and ninety-four dollars.”
    She clucked with surprise. “You don’t bet that much.”
    He shook his head, sadly. “My best week ever. Jesus, the prices. I don’t even want to think about it.”
    “What happened to him? Amato?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t have nothing to do with him any more.”
    He is not even curious, Mary Margaret thought. The bookie he used for twenty years doesn’t pay off, and he doesn’t wonder what happened to him.
    “When was that?” Mary Margaret said. “You didn’t tell me about it.”
    He drank his iced tea, wiped his mouth with one finger. “Years ago. The Slob was still coming here then.”
    “Him,” her mother echoed.
    She felt the usual anger grow and turn to sharp stomachache. Him. Or the Slob. They never used his name, as if he didn’t have one. Edward MacIntyre. Her husband by the rites of the Catholic Church.
    “I guess there wouldn’t have been time to tell me,” she said, keeping her voice perfectly even. “Not when every Wednesday was a fight.”
    She was the one arguing, defending, pleading. Edward said nothing, only played with the food on his plate until it was time for the novena and the silence it brought.
    Evenings driving home they hardly said a word, each fearful of the other’s misery.
    Mary Margaret said: “He came because you were my parents and I wanted him to come.”
    Her mother smiled patiently at her. Her father drank the last of his tea.
    “You want some more tea, Al?” her mother asked.
    They hadn’t even come to her wedding. She’d hoped they would, until the last minute she’d hoped, right up to the minute Father Robichaux began the ceremony. Edward’s parents