Thanksgiving by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online Page A

Well, Luce wasn’t stupid. She could tell a meal ticket when she saw one. She never cared about money when we were together. All she cared about was me and her babies. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.’
    I stood up and groped my way to the door. Outside, the night was eerily still. The wind having failed, the sign suspended from the metal mast gave no light.
    ‘Tone? Come back. I need you, Tone! Don’t leave me alone here.’
    I groped my way forward, stumbled on something and fell painfully, grazing my shin. I could just make out the figure of Darryl Bob Allen framed in the faint light from the doorway of the trailer. I stood up, trying to get my bearings in the darkness, then made my way back to the car.

NOT HERE
     
    She said, ‘He said I had the best breasts at San Francisco State.’ It was a casual aside in some conversation I don’t otherwise recall, quite early on in our relationship, and spoken in an almost self-deprecating way, like someone mentioning that they happen to be of the blood royal, as though she were embarrassed at having raised a topic which had nothing whatsoever to do with her personally, but which she felt an obligation to disclose lest the other person learn it later from some other source and feel hurt. Such aristocratic tact can easily come to seem like disdain, however, to those subject to its power.
    That phrase haunted me for years. For one thing, it sounded like a line of verse. I’d often tried to add a second to make a couplet, something ending in ‘fate’ or ‘hate’ perhaps, but I could never get it to scan.
    Another and perhaps more important reason was that until that moment I had never thought of her breasts as having a past. Still less a future.
    It was also notable in that, of all the women I’d known, Lucy seemed the least aware of or interested in her own beauty. In fact she wasn’t really interested in herself at all, even to a fault, I sometimes thought. She took herself lightly, and seemed both bemused and slightly amused by the amount of attention she got.
    A steady drizzle dripped down on the window of my hotel room, squeezed out of the clouds I’d flown through the day before, stacked five miles high overhead. The way the room faced, our house must theoretically have been visible somewhere on that low line of hills just beyond the freeway. I’d spent just one night there after Lucy’s memorial service, bunking down on the sofa in the living room. Frank had his old room in the basement, Claire the guest bedroom upstairs which had once been hers.
    Even in those extreme circumstances, I hadn’t managed to find out anything much about Frank, as reticent and evasive now as he had been when I’d moved in eight years earlier. His only apparent reference to his mother’s death was a comment he made on the back porch, pointing at the garden.
    ‘That’s where my tree-house used to be. Sometimes I’d get stuck up there. I was like six. And Mom would climb up and haul me back down.’
    His sister put her arm about him protectively. Once again, as so often in this cold town, I had felt myself effortlessly excluded.
    All I knew for semi-sure – this on the basis of Frank’s age and birthday, and the family lore which held that he’d been ‘right on time’, unlike his more difficult sister – was that Lucy had almost certainly conceived while I was spending a fortnight in Normandy with my then-wife, trying to resurrect our doomed marriage, a stressful project finally aborted when I got food poisoning from eating the local oysters and had to spend most of one memorable night tiptoeing to the communal first-floor lavatory.
    So while I was staring into the porcelain bowl, wondering if the red tint in my vomit was wine or blood, and worrying about whether I had woken Monsieur and Madame Dupont, whose boudoir was just behind a thin sheet of plywood covered in floral wallpaper enhanced with variegated stains and blotches on whose origins I soon learned to meditate