The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online Page B

the short radio report, when Lenny was imagining what the women would look like when they paraded past her front yard, the first call came. She knew it was Jackson. He called her five times a day at least, and after the first week, she never bothered to answer the phone again. She considered having the line disconnected but thought about robbers, like those idiots from Racine who held some poor woman captive because they needed a truck, and she decided to just let the damn thing ring.
    Jackson sent her mail too, long letters with the address of his cheap motel scrawled across the envelope. He apologized, told her he worshipped the ground she walked on, begged her to answer the phone, anything so that he could come back home. The letters were all stacked up inside of a brown paper bag in the corner of the kitchen.
    After the first two weeks he was gone, Jackson sent his buddy Pat over to make sure everything was okay. Lenny was out in the barn when he came, doing the same thing she had done every day for the past twenty-six years—hauling feed for a barn full of hogs.
    “Hey, Lenny,” Pat hollered from the door.
    “Well, shit, Patty boy, did that son-of-a-bitch send you to check on his little wife?”
    “Come on, will ya,” Pat said, swaggering a bit in his big boots and ripped barn jacket. “Yeah, he called, so shut up and let me help you.”
    “Patty, do you know what? I shut up for twenty-six years while that bastard ran all around the county with Melinda, and Grace, and whoever in the hell else happened to have a set of jugs bigger than mine. I'm not shutting up again.”
    “I know he loves ya.”
    “Loves me?” This cracked Lenny up. “Love for him is a hard-on. Just grab a bag and shut up yourself.”
    After that, Pat showed up every night to help her, and he was smart enough not to mention anything about love or Jackson again. Lenny almost started looking forward to the sight of him bending over in the barn, but she managed to stop short of that because she never wanted to look forward to anything that had to do with a man again.
    Lenny was forty-six years old, not bad looking for a woman who had lived with a bastard, raised two fairly decent kids, and hauled hog feed for most of her life. Her biggest problem now was trying to figure out what to do next.
    What she really wanted to do was go back in time and graduate from college. She wanted to whack herself upside the head for having run off to marry Jackson at the end of her junior year at Iowa State University. She wanted to stop crying half the night. She wanted to press a magic button and be the kind of woman everyone thought she was—a real hard-ass.
    Lenny wasn't a hard-ass. That's why she put up with Jackson for all those years, thinking day after day that tomorrow would be the day she would boot him out. But the excuses were always there. First it was the kids, then he broke his leg, then she had to have a hysterectomy, then the hogs got a virus. Then finally, there wasn't anything else, just the long nights and the begging and the stains on his clothes when she pulled them from the hamper.
    The morning she kicked him out was the coldest day of the year. She pulled her father's old double-barreled shotgun on him while he was working flat out in the barn. She pushed a suitcase toward him with the tip of her work boot, threw the keys to the old car at his bad leg, and told him it was time he was moving on.
    “What?” He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt.
    “I've had it, you big fucking jackass.”
    “Jesus, honey, put that thing down.”
    “You call me honey again, touch me, even look at me, and I'll blow your balls clear to hell.”
    “Okay, okay,” he said, stumbling back into the stacks of hay after he saw her eyes narrow to a slit as she brought the gun to her cheek, ready to fire, ready for anything. “What do you want?”
    “I'm taking everything, and you get the suitcase and the old car. Go, go fuck your way through the rest