The Remedy for Love: A Novel by Bill Roorbach Read Free Book Online

I don’t know what you think you’re going to get out of this situation. Because you’re going to get
nothing,
except your teeth beaten through your lips when Jimmy gets here.”
    Eric pushed the poker away from his chest, held it away from his chest, ready to catch the wrist of her knife hand if necessary. But she just kept the knife poised, fought to pull the poker back away from his grip. She wasn’t strong.
    “Easy,” Eric said.
    “Let go!”
    “I’m not going to let go. You were hurting me. Kind of got me right between the ribs there. Easy now. Okay? You didn’t see the road. You didn’t see how much snow. That first wet stuff has frozen solid and now there’s another, I don’t know, almost a foot since you’ve seen it. Don’t scoff. It really is a foot. Just since we came down. As for my coming back, I was afraid of freezing. I didn’t want to come back down here. But there’s no one around. No one. And what I want out of the situation at this point, and what I wanted coming back down here, the only thing I wanted—okay?—is not to die. I mean, that’s how serious. A person could really die. I’m half frozen, and I’m stuck here, and it’s because I tried to help you. I did help you. You wouldn’t have made it halfway home without my help. Now it’s my turn. Why can’t it be my turn?” He couldn’t stop the shivering, stood in the freezing puddle his office socks made, thin silk.
    Danielle let her end of the poker go such that the heavy handle swung and hit Eric in the shin. She let the knife come down, too, scuffed in her nice wool socks back to the kitchen corner, resumed her position at the butcher’s block, exactly the tableau he’d walked in on, went back to her chore—there’d been no interruption, Eric didn’t exist—went back to cutting the orange, not in wedges but in slices, round slices like you’d do a tomato, every seed picked out with the tip of the sharp knife. Only when she was done did she return to the problem of him, gave him a long look, the new puddle at his feet seeming to get her pity.
    “Okay,” she said sharply, “my husband is an Army Ranger, you know what that means? It means if you do anything off-game he will kill you with his bare hands and he’ll stuff your body into the outhouse pit and we’ll fill it in with rocks and no one will ever know.”
    Outside the wind kicked up into a new intensity, whistling through every crack in the cabin, puffs of fine snow coming up through the floorboards. Something flapped and knocked on the roof. Eric sidled back to the stove on frozen feet. She’d moved the copper tub far from the fire. The unusably torn panties were draped over its edge along with her washcloths. Eric hopped around absurdly on the icy floor while trying to keep a serious demeanor—because it was very important she take him seriously, very important he not have to go back out into the storm.
    “One minute it’s a normal afternoon,” he said shivering more violently for trying not.
    “The floor is frozen. You’ll have to dry your socks. I only have my one pair. Sit down. Take your socks off and dry them. Then we’ll just see.”
    “Thank you,” Eric said sitting. He rolled his thin, soaked socks off, put his feet up on a warm ledge of the stove, stinging relief.
    She stabbed the knife into the butcher’s block, brought him a slice of orange, watched him tear it and eat it, delicious, fresh, wet. She dipped a pot of water out of a plastic bucket on the floor, put it on the stovetop to heat, collected another orange in the kitchen, cut that up, too, slowly, methodically. He hung his socks on the edge of the tub, not too close to her broken underwear. She brought him more orange, plopped the slices on the chair arm, ate her own, looming over him, licking her fingers. The warmth started to move into his feet. He noticed how wet his pants legs were, soaking wet around his ankles and up to his thighs.
    “How do you get your drinking water?”