The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle Read Free Book Online Page B

there.”
    â€œYou can look, look, look for yourself,” Russell stuttered. “I’m telling you, I don’t know what you did with the fucking Tylenol.”
    â€œDo you need me to come home?” I asked.
    â€œNo. Stay out. I’ll keep looking.” He hung up on me in the middle of his own sentence and I went back to Said to hear more about how big he was, if that was in fact what he was talking about.
    â€œI tell you because you are my friend and you would not tell Cecylia. I do this for ten years when she is away.”
    I tried to look completely neutral, neither approving nor disapproving, which wasn’t that difficult because it was pretty much how I felt. I was trying to be less judgmental in general and their marriage had always disgusted me anyway. I knew—because I had brought him food once when he was very sick and she was away in Russia—that they had two little bedrooms. He had one and she shared one with their six-year-old daughter.
    â€œYou don’t know I do this?”
    â€œWhat? No,” I said.
    He let out a hearty foreign laugh and I had to slap his big rough hand five over the table. I had to stop coming to this café, I told myself. I was like an old mountain goat returning to the same patch of grass every day.
    His cell phone rang. “It is the woman!” he said. “She wants more of me.”
    I thought of Cecylia with her mother, sitting in the garden or cooking in the kitchen, while her husband fucked someone else in a hooker hotel. Their little bedrooms held less intimacy than cubicles in an office building. My cell phone rang. “I don’t know what to do,” Russell said. “I’ve scoured the entire apartment.”
    â€œI’m coming home,” I said, relieved to have an excuse to leave even though I had looked so forward to being able to sit in the café again. I paid the check and accepted the quart of chicken soup with rice that Said insisted I bring home to the baby.
    When I got home, I gave Duncan the Tylenol that had of course been right on the sink where I’d said it was and Russell scrambled to his desk in the living room, tripping over Humbert and bumping into strollers in his haste to get to work. I heated up a bottle of milk and Duncan fell right to sleep on my bed. I remembered when we’d first gotten Humbert and had taken him to the vet who’d said he had a terrible ear infection and I paid sixty dollars for drops that the vet said had to be refrigerated and when we got home Russell put the drops in the freezer and I had to go back to the vet a second time and buy the drops all over again.

6
    B y the time Shasthi showed up the next day, I was too tired of my careful list of questions to ask any of them. The minute she walked through the door, I knew she was the one I loved. The second I saw her, I knew I would be willing to give her two weeks’ paid vacation and breast-feed her children if necessary.
    â€œMay I wash my hands?” she said.
    I stood stiffly in the living room, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom.
    She was beautiful. She had long reddish hair, the color of pure Indian henna, and dark skin to match. She wore gold jewelry like an Indian gypsy and an apple-green shirt with gold sequins on it. She had normal undecorated nails that wouldn’t hurt Duncan’s scalp when she gave him a shampoo.
    She had come all the way from the Bronx but had arrived right on time. I sat facing her on the couch feeling incredibly guilty for some reason. As far as I was concerned she was hired but I knew I should ask her some questions first. “Have a cookie?” was all I could think of to say.
    â€œThank you,” she lilted, taking a mint Milano and nibbling on it reluctantly, making me feel a little like I had bullied her into eating it. I felt like a witch luring her into my gingerbread house. I felt grotesque next to her. She was at least six inches taller than me,