That Night by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page B

worked at the sink. He knew, unconsciously, that she would do anything for him. Long ago she had taken up their mother’s slack in compassion and care, taken up with a kind of fatalism what she saw as their consequences: she would never be loved sufficiently in return.
    “Don’t you even wonder what it’s like to get laid?” he whispered.
    “Go to hell,” she said.
    “To have some guy slip it to you?”
    She was silent, but her cheeks were burning.
    “Make you feel so good you want to go crazy.”
    “Drop dead,” she said.
    He sighed. “Guess if you’ve never had it, you’ll never miss it.”
    He turned from her. His father was leaning in the doorway. He had one crutch under his arm, and his free hand grasped the doorframe. “Knock it off, Rick,” he said. His father’s skin seemed tight on his skull. He seemed to be growing older and thinner by the hour.
    “Christ,” Rick whispered as he brushed past him. “Nice to be home.”
    He called again at about eight. Her grandmother answered the phone, and he said quickly, “Can I speak to Sheryl, please?” There was another pause. He could hear muffled voices, the sound of someone putting a hand over the receiver. Then her mother’s voice. “Yes?” As if she didn’t know who was on the other end.
    “Can I speak to Sheryl?” he said again.
    She hesitated once more and then simply said, “No, Rick. No you can’t.
    And I think it would be best if you didn’t call here anymore.”
    She hung up before he had shouted his reply. He dialed again, but the phone was once more off the hook. He pounded the metal wall of the booth, pulled open the doors.
    “She won’t let me talk to her,” he told his friends at the pinball machines, his voice cracking with anger. “I’ll kill her.” He headed for the doors as if that’s what he would do. Some of the bowlers had turned around when they heard his shout. His friends put their hands on his chest. He tried to push them away. “I’ll kill that old bitch,” he said, and they all feared he was about to cry. They got him out the door. He pulled away from them and kicked at his own car. “What the fuck’s going on?” he said. “What the fuck is happening?”
    Cautiously, they asked if he and Sheryl had had a fight, was there anything wrong between them. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, man, it’s her old lady. It’s that old bitch.”
    He said it to protect himself, no doubt, to keep from having to admit to them that he feared everything had changed, that he feared she had changed her mind overnight, become, as his mother used to do, another person entirely—one whose strangeness was all the more terrible because of what part of him it hid: she had said she loved him and then become someone else.
    His friends, who would have been more comfortable with his anger than with his tears, who would have preferred to say what should be done to the old bag than to offer their condolences over the loss of something as difficult as love, were no doubt willing to agree. Clearly, they said, she was keeping Sheryl from him, the jealous, horny old bitch. She had found out what Sheryl and Rick did. Her own husband had croaked (probably when he put his head between her legs, one of them said—they had left the bowling alley and were now leaning across their cars in another parking lot, drinking beer), so she’s jealous that her daughter’s getting what she’ll never get again, not unless she pays somebody. Sure, they said, that’s what’s going on. It’s the old lady, trying to make Rick think Sheryl’s stepping out on him. Probably keeping her locked in her room till Rick finds somebody else. Sure, that’s what’s going on.
    They shook their heads. They believed it. They had heard enough stories about bitter stepmothers and ugly old queens who locked beautiful girls in dungeons and towers. They were willing enough to see themselves as handsome, persecuted princes whose very rights as men these women