Trying the Knot by Todd Erickson Read Free Book Online

touch,
and Ben held the door open for Thad. They entered the circular core
lobby, which was painted aquamarine accented with mauve. It looked
like an organ from a medical textbook, and hallways led to a
labyrinth of appendage-like wings.
    Ben half-hoped to discover his boss, Ginny
Norris, there waiting for them. He longed for her soothing
presence. No one calmed his nerves like Ginny, especially when he
took into account their afternoon sessions of slow languid
lovemaking. Instead of Ginny, he found her polar opposite, which
took the form of her hostile, agitated daughter.
    Chelsea Norris sat bored, flipping through a
magazine for hungry horny housewives. When she saw Thad and Ben,
she jumped to her feet and told them everything they already
knew.
    “The priest left, and the police officer
wants you to stop by the station, Benjamin, since you’re the one
who found her,” Chelsea began. She tucked her straight, cropped-off
blond hair behind her ears. Short bangs framed sharp Nordic
features, which were more sun-kissed than usual. Her deep blue eyes
looked sleepy. “Nicholas is with Katherine.”
    “How’s Vange?”
    “She’s been stabilized, but there’s no
telling if or when she’ll regain consciousness.”
    “So, there’s no change except Nick is here,”
Ben said, opting not to acknowledge Nick’s presence had a calming
effect on the previously chaotic atmosphere.
    “Oh, Benjamin, my mom wants you to call her
as soon as possible,” Chelsea said, eyeing him suspiciously.
    Thad nodded in the direction of a former
classmate, who by chance happened to be standing across the lobby.
He waved his upraised bandaged hand at them, and Thad remarked,
“Suddenly, it feels like a class reunion.”
    “Someone bring me a barf bag,” Chelsea said.
It was her favorite saying for as long as Thad remembered. With the
regularity of which she said it, one would think she was sickened
by the world and her stomach was permanently roiling.
    Smiling proudly, the Italian Stallion pointed
his bloody wound at them. Everyone in the town called him Rocky,
after Rocky Balboa, ever since anyone could remember. The
pot-bellied brush cutter once belonged to a small but suspiciously
sociopathic contingency that whittled their days away in the high
school shop room.
    “Tree fell on me— or my hand anyway,” Rocky
yelled, deaf from the incessant buzzing of chainsaws.
    “Redneck,” Chelsea said under her breath,
smiling through her teeth.
    “He’s such a Dago,” Ben said.
    “Really? We’re still using derogatory racist
terms to describe ethnic origins?” Chelsea asked, cringing at the
epitaph.
    A ginger-headed toddler wrapped its dirty
little arm around Rocky’s leg and stared blankly at them. The
drooling dullard’s mother was a former Miss Portnorth beauty
pageant winner, and she sat nearby glued to a sexual maintenance
discussion unfolding on Phil Donahue. She yawned and swatted the
kid away from the gawking crowd.
    Thad elbowed Chelsea and whispered, “Rocky
has a nasty habit of knocking up girls from the same family. Her
sister is pregnant with his kid.”
    “Make me barf, that’s so wrong.”
    “It’s like a Jerry Springer episode,” Thad
said, and he added, “Vange lost her virginity to him.”
    “Ok, that’s more than I needed to know,” Ben
said, and he walked away.
    Chelsea imagined it was Evangelica seated on
the couch, hanging onto the grubby child rather than the washed up
queen, and she shuddered with disgust. Fixated moronically on the
elevated bandaged hand, the trio stiffly braved their way to
Vange’s room.
    “Whenever I see people we graduated with, I
always feel like the same dweeb I was back in high school,” Thad
said. “It’s as if the last five years of my life become a
nonexistent wasteland.”
    “What’re you talking about?” Ben asked.
    “The past five years of my life have been a
nonexistent wasteland,” Chelsea insisted, and she wrapped her arms
around her compact frame. “I knew