Sunday's on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly Read Free Book Online Page B

He considered the necessities of the situation. Basically, he had to get her into his sight as soon as possible. Jane wasn’t safe. She was free, and he had to save her from being free.
    I’m okay. I’m with my boyfriend. There was something so tragic about the likelihood of Jane having a boyfriend.
    Who’s the boyfriend? Claudio felt his muscles smoggy and syncopated, his liminal impulses hating this man before he would know his name.
    I’ve had a lot out here. But this one’s the last one. He’s the real deal. A grand slam! His name is Otis. Sit on a potato pan, Otis, she sang.
    Where are you now? Claudio asked. He thought, but didn’t say, - I’ll come and get you. -
    America. The beautiful.
    Can you be a little more specific?
    New Orleans. Jane pronounced it with a phony Creole accent, Narlins, a counterfeit native.
    That’s quite a ways.
    You feel closer through the phone, she said, metaphorically or crazily.
    I was thinking, do you want to come visit me in New York? Claudio thought about telling her that he had just gotten married but didn’t want to overwhelm her. Besides, he didn’t really feel married yet. Things were more or less the same. We just set up our apartment. You’d like it. It’s charming.
    Charming means small, my dear, said Jane.
    - Where does she have it in her to be snobby? - Claudio wondered. - What entitled her? -
    We have a guest room. We’ll stock it with wooden hangers and flowers, said Claudio. Magazines. A good reading light.
    I don’t know, Jane’s voice ricocheted. Maybe. She sounded like she had a cloud in her throat. Maybe she was eating yogurt, Claudio hoped.
    Well, I already bought you a ticket, and I don’t want it to have to go to waste.
    I can’t fly, said Jane.
    Why not?
    I need my boyfriend’s permission.
    Why’s that?
    Stop asking me questions, you crazy poo poo, said Jane. Take a hike.
    Blanche DuBois’s last line in A Streetcar Named Desire is I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.

the jane who was a sister
september 1976
    W hen Claudio was eleven, he snooped through his sister’s drawers. He had nothing in mind he was looking for, was only curious about the person his sister was turning into.
    What are you doing? Leave right now, said Jane, whose face and head smelled like anointed pomade, who’d recently gained about twenty pounds in her chest and hips. On the school bus that year, some guys made slurping noises to her, like faucets, and Claudio pretended not to hear them. It was the same deal for the nights when Jane would sound like she had a runny nose—there was no way she could’ve had a cold every night and be cured the next morning. With all the tulip-shaped Kleenex in her wastebasket. With her eyelids like pudding.
    For some reason Jane didn’t talk to him anymore; Claudio felt like he had made a mistake by growing up. Maybe he’d grown in a wicked direction or matured in a brusque way that convinced her not to like him. They were no longer a team, which both troubled and thrilled Claudio. It was only exciting because now a stranger (at best, an acquaintance) lived in his house. He knew a woman restricted and always a few feet away. The body shouldn’t have belonged to Jane. She didn’t know what to do with it anyway.
    Two weeks before, Claudio’s family went on vacation for the first and only time, to Las Vegas. They drove across the countryin their father’s Chevy Chevette hatchback, all of them fretting over the car’s probability to crumple like crepe paper.
    Eight dollars a night for their motel and they were greeted upon their arrival by two used towels in the bathroom, a drain clogged with ruffled hairs, and a muggy lock that wouldn’t open for eight minutes. On the penultimate night, Claudio’s father found dried bloodstains on the bottom of his pillow. Some luck, he said. You get what you pay for, I guess.