The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens Read Free Book Online Page A

proverbial kid in a candy store, Mary could not have trusted herself in the
     presence of such bonbons. But with no yearning for the almond bark and no desire for buttered toffee, she pulled on a sundress,
     borrowed Irma’s mules and arrived ten minutes early for her interview. She would work mornings, the shift no one else wanted,
     and Saturdays for the rest of the summer, and cut back to just Saturday when school began. Past Mary, present Mary, in-between
     Mary—like Gooch, the walls of Raymond Russell’s had borne witness to most of her life.
    Jimmy Gooch hobbled into the drugstore on tall, squeaky crutches one Saturday morning in November of their senior year, having
     been absent from school for two weeks, during which the Leaford Senior Cougars had lost four straight games. He’d been in
     a terrible car crash for which his father had been hospitalized, and no one had seen him since the accident. There were rumors
     at school that his leg was broken in four places. A stitched cut was healing on his forehead, and there was a faint yellow
     cast to his left cheek, where the worst of the bruising had been. He was wearing a stained sweatshirt and basketball shorts
     to accommodate the huge plaster cast on his left leg. Seventeen-year-old Gooch searched the store, pinching a square of white
     paper in his big, trembling fingers, a drowning man, until he spotted Mary Brody sailing toward him.
    The sign flickering in his expression read,
I am saved
. Perhaps he saw his own reflection deep within Mary’s eyes, and imagined that she already possessed him. Or maybe he recognized
     her as belonging to his new circle of damaged souls. Their whole lives felt decided in that moment.
    Gooch paused, watching her, then lifted his shoulders and smiled wanly as if to say,
Ah, life
. Mary Brody nodded twice and tilted her head as if to respond,
I know
. She gestured for him to follow her to the back, which he did, swinging his long frame on the complaining crutches. She took
     the prescription and passed it to Ray Russell Sr., quietly asking if he could fill it right away, for her
friend
. She turned to find Gooch waiting, eager, like a pup. She wordlessly showed him to a chair, feeling the heat rise from his
     body as he lowered his cast to the floor and himself to the seat.
    Mary breathed him: leather jacket, unwashed body, dusty scalp. His round blue eyes begged for affection, clarity. As if they
     had already been married twenty-five years, instead of never having had a conversation before, she frowned reflectively and
     asked, “What are the doctors saying about your dad?”
    Gooch’s father, James, a tower like his namesake, had driven the Dodge, in which Gooch was passenger, straight into the hundred-year-old
     oak tree at the sharpest bend in the river road, on the way home from the strip club at Mitchell’s Bay, where Gooch had been
     sent to retrieve him. James had insisted on driving and Gooch was, tragically, more afraid of his father’s drunken rage than
     he was of his drunken driving. He had buckled into the passenger side, trying to convince himself that his father
did
drive better juiced than sober, just as he professed. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from muttering, “Asshole,” to which
     his father responded with a crisp backhand. That was how his cheek got bruised, but no one except Mary would ever know that.
    Gooch looked at Mary directly. “Still feels like a dream.”
    “That could be your medication,” she said with authority.
    The article in the
Leaford Mirror
didn’t mention, under the photograph of the smashed Dodge, that James Gooch had been driving home from the strip club, but
     it did note his impairment, and describe the paralysis and brain swelling and the unlikelihood that he would wake from his
     coma. The article also reported that Jimmy Gooch had a leg injury and would not play out the rest of the high school season,
     further speculating that Gooch’s hopes of a basketball