Small World by Tabitha King Read Free Book Online

living,’ she interrupted, ‘so excuse me.’
    ‘Wait,’ he pleaded.
    ‘I’m waiting, but only out of an overly trained respect for my
    elders.’
    ‘The pictures were great,’ he rushed, ‘and you were beautiful. Are you really twenty-nine?’
    ‘Thanks. No, I’m fourteen, I just look old for my age. You’re in really hot water because of it too, but you deserve it. You might have warned me so I could wear something more flattering than a pair of jeans that makes my butt look as big as the FBI building.’ ‘I dunno,’ he mused, ‘I think your butt looked fine. Besides, if I’d warned you, you wouldn’t have come.’
    ‘You are horrifyingly devious.’
    He chortled evilly. ‘Don’t forget, me proud beauty, I have your daddy’s mortgage.’
    Lucy laughed. ‘See ya tonight, Snidely.’
    ‘You must free yourself, my dear, from this Puritanical, middle-class obsession with work.’
    ‘I am middle class and Puritanical. And I have these middle-class, Puritanical kids who have wicked appetites. You wanna feed ’em?’
    There was a brief, satisfying pause from Nick.
    ‘Well?’ she demanded, enjoying the unexpected sensation of having backed him into a comer.
    ‘I’m thinking about it,’ he said. ‘They’re neat kids. I just don’t know if I could take their mother’s backchat.’
    ‘I learned everything I know from you.’
    ‘Whew. For a minute there I thought you were going to spit all over the phone again and electrocute yourself. ’
    ‘You’d better go play with your museum,’ Lucy insisted, ‘and let me go back to work.’
    ‘Too bad, I was just going to ask you to have dinner with me tonight.’
    ‘So ask.’ Lucy studied the clock. If Nick would ever let her get some work done, she would treat herself to a night off.
    ‘Eight o’clock?’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘Have you heard from Dolly yet?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘That’s why you’re so anxious to go back to work,’ he accused. ‘You’re too clever. You forgot Pop. He answers phones, along with his many other fine attributes.’
    ‘But Zach’s sleeping now. You’ll take the phone off the hook. I was surprised I got through, but I surmised you might be entranced with your own image in this glorious rag.’
    Lucy laughed. ‘See ya tonight, Snidely.’
    She hung up and immediately took the phone off the hook, hanging the receiver over the edge of the corkboard next to the phone.
    ‘Pop,’ she asked, sticking her head into the living room, ‘will you babysit tonight after eight?’
    ‘Course.’ He flicked one big hand in her direction. His eyes never left the screen. ‘Pure horseshit, this show, know that, Lu?’
    She nodded. ‘I’ll be in the workshop, Pop.’
    Nick Weiler stroked his beard and listened to the buzz of the open line for a few seconds. Unwilling to let Lucy go, he listened to her
    absence.
    At last he hung up and stared at the magazine, open on his desk. Lucy had been unnerved during the picture-taking with Dolly. The whole business of the publicity had surprised her and then too, she was almost always thrown onto the defensive around Dolly. In the picture with her kids, she came into her own.
    The photographer had caught the curious upward slant of her eyes over her cheekbones, which were not the hollow, starved bones of the fashion model, but were fully fleshed and modeled, as if sculpted in some fine-grained bleached wood. The Tartar in her, she explained away her eyes and facial structure, joking away both her ancestry and her temperament.
    And then he thought of her hands, with their calluses that were like thin bark, as if she were still caught somewhere in some mythic metamorphosis, still barely Galatea, or just becoming Daphne. But the very center of her palms and between her fingers, at the bases, the skin was smooth and silky.
    When the phone buzzed once and one of the numbers lit up, he reluctantly put his thoughts of Lucy away and picked it up.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘It’s Mrs. Douglas, Dr. Weiler.’
    Not