The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online

still she feels he is angry at her and ought to be. She finds an ashtray in the drawer of the bedside table, cocks her head at the hanging bottle of fluid, and says: ‘Is that your food?’
    â€˜Saline. Eat with a straw.’
    â€˜Can you smoke?’
    â€˜Don’t know.’
    She holds her cigarette between his lips, on the right side, away from the stitches. She cannot feel him drawing on it; he nods, she removes it, and he exhales a thin stream.
    â€˜Are you hurt anywhere else? Your body?’
    â€˜No. How did you know?’
    â€˜My father called me.’ She offers the cigarette, he nods, and as he draws on it, she says: ‘He said you’re not pressing charges.’
    His face rolls away from the cigarette, he blows smoke toward the tube rising from his arm, then looks at her, and she knows what she first saw in his eyes and mistook for pain.
    â€˜I don’t blame you,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t either. In June he came into my apartment with a fucking knife and raped me. I was afraid to do anything, and I kept thinking he was gone. Really gone, like California or someplace. Because Dad checked at where he worked and his apartment, and he never went back after that night. Even if I knew he hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have. Because he’s fucking crazy .’
    She stands and takes her cigarettes and disposable lighter from her purse and puts them on the table.
    â€˜I’ll leave you these. I have to go. I’ll be back.’
    Her eyes are filling. Besides Steve, Vinnie is the only person outside her family she has told about the rape, but his eyes did not change when she said it; could not change, she knows, for the sorrow in them is so deep. She has known him in passion and mirth, and kissing his forehead, his unbruised left cheek, his chin, she feels as dangerous as Ray, more dangerous with her slender body and pretty face.
    â€˜I guess it wasn’t worth it,’ she says.
    â€˜Nothing is. I’m all broken.’
    Sometimes, on her days off that summer, she put on a dress and went to Timmy’s in early afternoon to drink. It was never crowded then, and always the table by the window was empty, and she sat there and watched the Main Street traffic and the people walking outside in the heat; or, in the rain, cars with lights and windshield wipers on, the faces of drivers and passengers blurred by rain and dripping windows.
    She slept late. She was twenty-six and, for as long as she could remember, she had hated waking early; now that she worked at night, she not only was able to sleep late, but had to; she lived at home and no longer felt, as she had when she was younger and woke to the family voices, that she had wasted daylight sleeping while everyone else had lived half a day. There had been many voices then, but now two brothers and a sister had grown and moved away, and only Margaret was at home. She was seventeen and drank a glass of wine at some family dinners, had never, she said, had a cigarette in her mouth, had not said but was certainly a virgin, and early in the morning jogged for miles on the country roads near their home; during blizzards, hard rain, and days when ice on the roads slowed her pace, she ran around the indoor basketball court at the YMCA. She received Communion every Sunday and, in the Lenten season, every day. She was dark and pretty, but Polly thought all that virtue had left its mark on her face, and it would never be the sort that makes men change their lives.
    Polly liked her sister, and was more amused than annoyed by the way she lived. She could not understand what pleasures Margaret drew from running and not drinking or smoking dope or even cigarettes, and from virginity. She did understand Margaret’s religion, and sometimes she wished that being a Catholic were as easy for her as it was for Margaret. Then she envied Margaret, but when envy became scorn she fought it by imagining Margaret on a date;