The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta Read Free Book Online Page B

friend, consoler, explainer of the world. They’d shared a bedroom for thirteen years, trading gossip, complaining about their parents, mumbling secrets to each other until they nodded off, then waking up together to the tinny music warbling out of the clock radio on the table between their beds. With Mandy away, the house seemed perpetually out-of-whack—distressingly tidy and much too quiet, as if something more than a single person had been subtracted from the whole.
    It hadn’t been so bad for the first couple of months. Mandy called most nights and came home every other weekend, full of fascinating new information and unusually strong opinions. But then, at Thanksgiving, she solemnly informed the family that she’d fallen in love —she delivered this announcement at the dinner table, with an air of self-importance that Ruth had found both thrilling and vaguely sickening—and since then, she hadn’t come home at all, except for an obligatory couple of days at Christmas. Now Ruth considered herself lucky if she spoke to her sister once a week, and when she did, Mandy’s mind was a thousand miles away; she couldn’t even fake an interest in the details of Ruth’s pathetic teen dramas. All she wanted to talk about was Desmond, the Irish grad student with the beautiful eyes and soulful voice, who had awakened her to the suffering and injustice of the world. They were planning on traveling to Nicaragua over the summer to see the Sandinista Revolution for themselves, to cut through the fog of lies and propaganda spewed out by the American government and its toadies in the media.
    Great , thought Ruth. And I’ll be home with Mom and Dad, waitressing at the IHOP .
    It wasn’t that Ruth had a bad relationship with her parents, at least not compared to a lot of kids she knew. They weren’t especially strict or even normally vigilant; for the most part, they trusted her to make her own decisions about who she hung out with, where she went, and what time she came home. It probably helped that Ruth got good grades, didn’t have a boyfriend, and rarely got invited to parties.
    She had only one real problem with her parents, but it was a big one: they were just so depressing . With Mandy around, she had barely noticed. Now, though, Ruth had no choice but to observe her mother and father during their interminable, mostly silent family dinners, and wonder how it was possible that two reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent people could sleep in the same bed and have so little interest in what the other was thinking or feeling. They rarely spoke a kind orcurious word to each other, and hardly ever laughed when they were together. They did kiss good-bye in the morning, but the act seemed utterly mechanical, no more tender or meaningful than when her father patted his back pocket on the way out the door to make sure his wallet was there. They paid so little attention to each other that a stranger might have assumed they’d been randomly assigned to live together, roommates who wanted nothing more than to keep out of each other’s way.
    It hadn’t always been like this, though. Ruth had the photographic evidence to prove it—wedding albums, honeymoon snapshots, happy family portraits from when she and her sister were little. In the old pictures, her mother and father smiled, they touched, they looked at each other. So what happened? Every now and then, when Ruth was alone with her mother, she tried to find out.
    “Is something wrong? Are you and Dad mad at each other?”
    “Not at all. Everything’s fine.”
    “Fine? You never even talk to him.”
    “We talk all the time. We have a very good relationship.”
    Conversations like this made Ruth glad her mother had gone back to work full-time, which meant that she at least had a few hours to herself when she got home from school, some time to mellow out and do her homework in peace. It hadn’t mattered so much in the fall, when Ruth had been a jayvee cheerleader, an