Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie Read Free Book Online Page A

Even Howie, even if he is a guy.”
    “I’d like forever,” Maddie said, and then she straightened in her chair. “Except I wouldn’t because I’d die without Em. And it’s a fantasy. I have to live in this town, and my mother deserves me taking care of her, and Em definitely deserves me taking care of her, and I was the one who promised Brent I’d be there for better or worse, so forget the desert island.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I want. I think I’d better just concentrate on what I can have.”
    “You can have a divorce,” Treva said. “Leave him.”
    “What if he isn’t cheating?” Maddie said. “What if there’s an explanation? There might be. It’s possible.”
    Treva rolled her eyes. “Fine. Then talk to him. But do it.”
    Talk to him. Say, Brent I’m going to leave you. Say, I’m taking Em and leaving you. Five years disappeared with blinding speed. She’d been here before and it had been horrible. Maddie felt her eyes grow hot and steeled herself. She was not going to cry. She was not going to sit in her best friend’s kitchen and be pathetic. She stood up, needing to escape before the tears came. “Right. I know you’re right. I do. But I have to go now.”
    “All right.” Treva sat back. “Sure. Later. Whatever you want. Are you sure you’re all right?”
    “Just peachy,” Maddie said, and went to get her daughter.

    The heat was so thick that the air weighed Maddie down as she Walked Em home down Linden Street. She must have walked down Linden a million times in her life. She’d lived with her mother in the old yellow house two blocks down from Treva’s place, and Treva had lived where she and Howie lived now, taking the house over from her mom and dad when they’d moved to the condos by the river. All Maddie’s life, Linden had meant running up a block to see Treva, breathless with plans or news, just as it meant walking down three blocks to see her now.
    And it had meant Brent, coming by to pick her up and drop her off on dates and school days, Brent who’d bought her a house on Linden because she loved the street and wanted to be close to Treva, Brent who could be so sweet and who was probably cheating on her now.
    Do you hate him? Treva had asked. It was possible to love someone and hate him at the same time; she’d felt that way about him once, after Beth. But now all she felt was rage and dread and lethal exasperation; there wasn’t any love left to counteract anything anymore. And that was her marriage. To her horror, she found she couldn’t stop the tears. Em would see. “Race you to the car,” she said, and pounded down the last block to collapse in the driver’s seat of her aged Civic, winded but not weeping.
    Em got in and slammed the car door behind her a minute later. “No fair. You got a head start. Where are we going? Why can’t we take Dad’s car? It’s better.”
    Because I’m never getting in that car again. Maddie put the car in gear. “This one’s fine. Let’s go see your dad.”
    Em grew still. “Okay.”
    Maddie met her eyes and smiled, straining every muscle in her face to make it do what it didn’t want to do. “We’ll just ask him what he wants for dinner. That’ll be fun.”
    “Okay,” Em said again, but the cautious look stayed in her eyes.
    Maddie backed out of the drive while Em hunched down so no one would see her in a rustmobile. The Civic, at least, was one battle Maddie had won in her marriage. She gripped the steering wheel harder as she thought about it. Brent had pushed her to trade it in for the new car he wanted to buy her and had even sent a tow truck to drag it away, but she’d thrown herself across the hood of the car at the last minute, and the guy in the tow truck had gone off without it. “I love this car,” she’d told Brent. “I paid for it myself, it never stalls, and I understand it. It takes years to learn a car like I know this one. I wanted to be buried in this car.” Brent had