Through the Heart by Kate Morgenroth Read Free Book Online Page A

she was there for years. She must have gotten some retirement or something. Some savings . . . something.”
    “I don’t know anything about it except what she told me. Why don’t you ask her, if you want to know.” I suddenly felt exhausted. I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs.
    “I really need the money, Nor. Seriously.”
    I wondered if using my childhood nickname was unconscious or some sort of strategy, an attempt to call on the old times, old loyalties, old affection. Whatever it was, I matched her nickname for nickname.
    “I don’t have it, D. I’m sorry. But I just don’t have it.”
    “You want us to be out on the street?” my sister said, almost desperately. If it was an act, it was a good one.
    “You’re not going to be out on the street. Boyd wouldn’t let that happen.”
    “Boyd’s gone,” Deirdre said quietly.
    I looked up at my sister. Deirdre was standing there, looking lost. I’d never seen my sister look quite like that before.
    “He’s left before, and he’s always come back,” I said.
    Boyd was a binge drinker. He sometimes went months without drinking, he went to meetings, he did everything he was supposed to do. Then he’d disappear for a week, sometimes two. Once I think he disappeared for a month, and my sister was convinced he was dead somewhere. When he showed up, he was always full of apologies. He would promise it would never happen again. But it always did.
    “No,” my sister said. “It’s different this time. He’s not off drinking somewhere. He left me for someone else. Someone he met in AA. He says she understands him. She’ll help him stay clean, unlike me. Apparently I drive him to drink. And he never wanted the twins. He says he can’t be sober and handle the pressures of being a father.”
    “But he can’t just leave. He still has to help you. He can’t just abandon all his responsibilities.”
    “Oh, come on, Nor. Grow up. It’s Boyd we’re talking about. What else has he been doing all his life but abandoning his responsibilities? Sometimes I think he’s not even really an alcoholic. I think it just gives him an excuse to disappear, and that every time he leaves, he’s really secretly hoping I won’t take him back. That I’ll drop him like a hot potato, like what happened with all his jobs. His bosses—they could see the writing on the wall. Why couldn’t I? But no, I had to go have babies with him because I thought I could get him to straighten up that way. What a joke. Even before the babies, it was too much for him. He had to escape when it was just me. Why did I think that loading on more would make it better?”
    She paused for a moment, then she said suddenly, “You knew.”
    “Me?” I hadn’t seen this coming.
    “Yes. I still remember what you said to me when you first met him.”
    I had no memory of it. “What did I say?” I asked.
    “Well, you said he seemed fun.”
    “He was,” I said, recalling Boyd’s antics that first night I met him. He seemed to take special delight in making me laugh, no matter how outrageous he had to get.
    I also remembered how jealous Dan had gotten. He said he didn’t like Boyd, didn’t trust him, thought I should tell my sister he was bad news. And then, sometime later, he asked me why I never laughed at his jokes. That comment in itself would have been funny if Dan hadn’t been serious. But that was the thing—Dan was always serious. Then he said (and I remembered this later) that couples should laugh more than we did. I remembered that when he left me for Stacey the giggler.
    “But it was what you said after that that I’m talking about,” Deirdre said.
    “I liked Boyd. I don’t think I said anything bad about him.”
    “You said that he couldn’t sit still.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    It was true. I don’t think Boyd stayed seated in a chair for more than five minutes the whole night.
    “And you asked me what it was like to be in a relationship with someone who couldn’t sit still. I