Ruby by Ann Hood Read Free Book Online Page A

Cumberland Farms down the street only sold things like beef jerky and ranch-flavored chips. And Spaghetti-Os. Olivia had gotten up early this morning and gone there for supplies while the girl slept upstairs, hot and tangled in the sheets, frowning. Olivia had watched her, willing her—uselessly—awake. Giving up, she’d gone for some food and come back with all the junk she could afford. “This is disgusting, Pal,” Olivia said to the empty room. Since her husband had died, she had started to talk to empty rooms. She had even started to hope for replies. She had started to make lists, to break things down to their simplest terms. Eating her Spaghetti-Os, waiting for Ruby to get up, she listed things she missed about being married to David. They loved to eat sugary cereal for dinner if they’d had a long day. They loved painting each other’s toenails, Siamese cats, square cars, Eames chairs, reading Rod McKuen poems out loud to each other. They loved Leonard Cohen songs, Disneyland but not Disney World, The Twilight Zone, Sam Adams beer. They loved each other.
    The little round noodles slid around Olivia’s mouth like worms.
    “I will not cry,” she told the empty room.
    She waited.
    “Cold Spaghetti-Os,” Olivia continued. “For breakfast. Are you happy, Pal? This is what you’ve reduced me to.”
    Her friend Camille told her he wasn’t really gone, that he’d just taken a new form. Olivia tried to imagine him: an angel on a fluffy cloud, a beam of light like Tinkerbell, a shadowy image of his former self lurking in this very room like one of the ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted House. But none of it worked. Olivia knew that if he were here, in any form, he would have pointed out that she had ended a sentence in a preposition.
    So she added, “This is what you’ve reduced me to, asshole. ”
    Anger, everyone told her, was a good thing.
    She stood and smeared a good-sized section of the wall in front of her with artist’s glue, the kind she’d used back in art school fifteen years ago for her mosaics of broken china and crystal that she tided The State of Domesticity at the End of the Twentieth Century. Then she stepped back and flung the can of Spaghetti-Os at the wall. The little round noodles sprayed out, landing haphazardly. Some stuck immediately. Others slid down a bit before resting.
    Olivia stepped back and surveyed the results.
    It worried her that she was starting to like the wall. That the happy fat fruit she’d imagined painting on it grew more and more surreal every time she tried to envision them.
    Olivia decided that later she would shellac the Spaghetti-Os and spray-paint them gold. Which would do absolutely nothing for the resale value of the house. Which was why she had come: to pack up, clean up, and put it on the market.
    She opened another can, sat back down at the table, and began to eat, reading the ingredients to avoid thinking about why she had come.
    “There are carrots in here,” she said out loud. She looked around the kitchen, hopeful, imagining David in some ghostly see-through form, as if he were made of organza.
    David once ate so many carrots, he’d told her, that the whites of his eyes turned orange. That’s when he was macrobiotic, back in the Bay Area. Even the mention of carrots could make him gag.
    “Look,” Olivia said, holding a spoonful of Spaghetti-Os out to the room, the universe. “Carrots.”
    But the room remained silent and empty. Of course. Dead people don’t correct grammar or worry about eating food they don’t like. Dead people, Olivia thought for the hundredth or thousandth or billionth time, were simply dead.
    If she hadn’t been mad at Winnie, this would have been a good time to call her. I’m going crazy, she’d say. I’m losing it. I’m eating canned food and waiting for David to appear as a bug or something. But Winnie had gone and fallen in love herself, at her twentieth high school reunion, which she had complained and complained and