The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls Read Free Book Online Page A

if avoiding a punch. How did she know? Did someone see her walk in with Sonny and tell her? And why is it all right? Sonny should be here. He should fucking be here. But Gaia is calm, almost smiling reassuringly. It makes Bess wonder if she’s talking about Rory, too.
    “Yes,” says Gaia, as if an answer to an unsaid question. “We’ll be just fine.”
    We? Why we ? We, as if they were in this together, as if they’ve known each other all their lives and can feel each other’s pain. Bess backs out of the room, picks up the phone in her living room and dials 911.
    “Metropolitan Police Department, your name please?”
    “Bess Gray,” she says. “We . . .”—that word channeling through her as if coming from some ancient place, flying through the ages from long-ago war widows and cocooned queens and poor orphaned girls to all the women now who know, too, the pain of loneliness. “We,” she repeats, “we need help.”

Chapter Four
    M aggie had made sense with all that talk of immigration. I’d been listening to the boys at the construction site where I was picking up some quick cash off the books, so I knew I had to do something if I wanted to stay, and doing it through part-time jobs was proving difficult. I stayed in bed with my head-splitting pity for the next week until my landlord came crashing in and knocked me up some sense. I thought about going back to Ireland, I’ll admit, but I didn’t want to go back without Maggie. I was ashamed, but I also wanted to stay closer to her in case she took me back. So I married Carol Pendleton and at the same time worked my way through college.
    Apparently there was a whole underground network for this sort of thing, American girls willing to marry immigrant boys like me and all I had to do was know the right people, which turned out to be a friend of the bartender’s sister where I played fiddle once in a while. He slipped me her number and said here, call her, she likes Irish boys. I didn’t know what to make of it all, I really didn’t, but I called. We met out at a candlelit restaurant in Cambridge that she suggested where she ordered lobster and a bottle of French wine and then cappuccino and crêpes suzette and I tell you all these things specifically because I had never had lobster or French wine or cappuccino or crêpes suzette and my knees were shaking under the table the whole time with both excitement and utter terror. Carol was a bold woman, like Maggie, but bigger with curves in all the right places and short blond hair that curled into her chin. She had a lazy eye that took to roving independently every now and again, and that was disconcerting, but she also had the most perfectly straight, shiniest white teeth I’d ever seen and that’s what I kept staring at mostly. And she was sexy, too, in her designer jeans and flarey blouse that showed ample cleavage. She was smart and self-assured, that’s for sure. She talked about her classes at Harvard and her volunteering for Jimmy Carter, but mostly about the hatred she felt for her ill-informed, narrow-minded, bourgeois parents—that’s what she called them, bourgeois —and all I was trying to figure out the whole time, sitting there like an idiot in my bib, was how to get the meat out of a claw without flinging it across the room. That’s what it came down to really: I was trying to pull meat from a claw and she was sniffing the cork, deciding whether to send the wine back or drink it, have her fun and throw the bottle away; that’s what I was thinking and feeling like by the end of the night and I was going to walk right out of that restaurant and say forget it, I can’t do this, when she up and paid the check and asked me if I wanted to marry her. Just like that.
    She said she was a history major and knew all about Northern Ireland’s fight against the British imperialists and the way she was talking, I thought she might know more than I ever did. She said she would have stayed and helped