Substitute for Love by Karin Kallmaker Read Free Book Online

wasn’t a self-centered bitch.”
    She laughed. “No, but we did fight about my mother.”
    “Then what?” He leaned against the counter and crossed his ankles.
    “Are you ready?”
    He swallowed and signaled consent with his spoon.
    “I quit my job.”
    His face went still. “What?”
    “I quit my job. Ask me why.” She could not stop grinning.
    Flushing, he asked, “Why?”
    “Because they blatantly fired a co-worker because she was gay. They even made up some crap about her being tardy, as if that mattered, but it was really because she was gay. I told them if she went, I would go, too. So…” She shrugged one shoulder.
    In a flat voice, he said, “You had one of your brainstorms.”
    The phrase echoed in Holly’s head, most of all because she hadn’t anticipated it.
    When did you send away for the application, he had wanted to know. She replied that it had just seemed like a good idea, and look what it had gotten her, admission to MIT. You had one of your brainstorms, he said firmly. You gave in to an impulse without thinking it through.
    “Yes,” she answered. “I suppose I did. It was the right thing to do. It’s not right to fire someone because they’re gay”
    “Did you stop to think at all?”
    He was out of patience with her. But… but she didn’t know what she had done wrong. It’s always something, Jo seemed to whisper.
    She had applied to MIT’s masters program because her undergraduate advisor had urged her to do it. But she hadn’t thought it through. Clay set out the issues for her, calmly and clearly. What good is a master’s degree in something as anti-humanist as mathematics? Math is how they build bombs and waste money on space stations. Math is how they use statistics to pretend homelessness doesn’t exist and that everyone who wants a job has one. Math is how five dollars an hour is equated to a living wage. What was the point of a master’s degree in that? And a doctorate? MIT just wanted her mind, just wanted to exploit her on the altar of capitalism…
    His arguments went round and round in her mind.
    He walked with her to the mailbox but said nothing, made no gesture. It was her own hand that pulled down the lid, and her own hand that deposited her letter declining the scholarship and degree program MIT had offered. The lid swung shut with a loud clang.
    As they had walked back to the student dorm where she lived, he had said something like — no, exactly this: “What kind of job were you planning to get?”
    He said it again now. “What kind of job were you planning to get?”
    She blinked at him and felt as if she were struggling with a circular reference.
    “You made a rash decision and as with all of them, now you have to live with it.”
    “I was thinking…” The skeptical look on his face made her voice trail away.
    “You haven’t thought about it, have you?” Sighing, he looked so sad. He was thirty-five and she’d known him — or of him — since she was sixteen, ten years and counting. They’d been lovers for the last eight of those years. “What is it, Holly? What would help you slow yourself down so you can consider the consequences of your actions?”
    The stubborn thought resurrected itself. “I did the right thing. I had to do it, mostly because I could do it.”
    He didn’t say he was at his wit’s end, but he looked it. “Do we have to start over? Do you need more coaching on your breathing, your meditation?”
    She felt a jolt of anger and knew he would think even less of her if she let it show. She’d been angry too many times today, starting with Jo. “I don’t feel like you’re hearing me. I did it because it was the right thing to do. I did it because that’s what I thought. And I thought that it was what you would do.”
    “We can’t speculate on that. I would never be working there.”
    Jo’s voice again. But he likes the paycheck just fine.
    How could she have thought he would approve? “I don’t want to