The Slippage: A Novel by Ben Greenman Read Free Book Online Page A

it crashed into the ocean. “It’s not like he was around,” she said. “He didn’t want anything to do with us. But this is so permanent.” Her lower lip trembled. He had never seen her so close to crying.
    For a little while they were together again. William read the newspaper to the boy and fed him from a bottle and held him frequently enough that for the rest of his life he would be able to remember the hot little body with its rapid, rabbity heartbeat. When William and Louisa got back together, Karla wrote herself out of the scene, though they still met twice a year to mark the passage of time on each other’s faces.
    “Move your elbow,” Karla said, pointing up at the waitress. “She’s trying to give you your iced tea.”
    “Thanks, Mom,” William said.
    “You wish,” Karla said.
    “Speaking of which,” William said, “I have a story.” He had been at the park a few weeks before and had seen Christopher by the basketball courts, ringed by friends. When William had waved, the boy had returned a stiff reverse nod, chin lifted from chest as if by guide wire.
    Karla laughed. “Ten years old and already treats you like a colleague.”
    “I could use a man like him down at the office.”
    “How’s it going over there, anyway?”
    “Been better,” he said. “But things are tough all over.”
    “True,” Karla said, blushing a bit because she had no idea. She was living in a large house in the best part of town and casually dating a young filmmaker, also independently wealthy, who took her on ski vacations twice a year and was teaching Christopher to ride a horse. “And how’s the home front?”
    “Ah, the home front,” William said. “Smooth? Bumpy? Who can say? Louisa’s brother moved to town. She threw a party for him and then refused to come out.”
    “For how long?”
    “The whole party.”
    “Hmm,” Karla said.
    “The party’s not the only thing,” William said, and then had to think if it was. “I think she might be hoarding the mail.”
    “Hoarding?”
    “Squirreling it away. I found two bags of it in the house, hidden in corners.”
    “Is she depressed?” Karla, precise in so many things, defaulted to the vaguest language when it came to the feelings of others.
    “I don’t think so,” William said. “The other day, she drove me out to a plot of land in the middle of nowhere.”
    “Sounds like a mob hit.”
    “Turns out it’s land she owns. We own.”
    “Congratulations,” she said.
    “I guess,” he said. “I stood there in front of the land and felt empty.”
    “It’s an investment,” Karla said.
    “But in what?”
    “In your future,” she said. “I hope you didn’t make her feel bad about it.”
    “Sometimes people place the future between themselves and the present,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to make things work now. If I do that, then the future’s just the sound of that same note sustaining.”
    “That’s beautiful,” Karla said. The idea was something William had acquired from a magazine, which didn’t make it less beautiful.
    William paid, as always. It would have been nothing to Karla, and he wanted it to be something, at least. The cashier was the daughter of the owner. She smiled when she saw him looking at her. He had known the girl since she was six or seven and seen her at least yearly since then. She had been small and plump as a child but was now tall and angular, with a pleasant open face and skin as tight and fresh as an apple. Over the years she had absorbed hundreds of thousands of glances, touches, conversations, not to mention time itself, the minutes, the seconds, the smaller pieces that could not be casually measured but were still indisputable. She had grown thin in part because she had grown full with time. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, and she had the body of a young woman, mostly there, never quite there. William wondered if Karla, looking at the girl, would think of the younger versions of herself, or