Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction by Amy Bloom Read Free Book Online

second hand is hammering around the dial.
    “Oh, I know,” she says. “How about a little Percocet? Just a quarter, take the edge off.”
    “Is that a good idea?” William says. If she had offered him a bottle of almost anything, William would have taken it, but prescription drugs that make you feel better scare the shit out of him.
    Clare takes a white pill out of her pocket and bites it in half. She spits half of it back into her hand and swallows.
    “Here. Half. You don’t have to take it.”
    William takes it. It seems like an extremely reckless and adolescent thing to do, but he isn’t operating any heavy machinery, he isn’t driving or running for office, he is just sitting on the couch with his old friend, waiting for his wife to come back.
    It dissolves in Clare’s throat, leaving a sandy, salty trail. She pulls herself up to William and hugs him.
    “You were very good with Nelson. After a while.”
    “He’s a good kid. He was lucky.”
    “You can’t beat lucky,” she says.
    “We’ve been lucky. So far,” William says.
    “We really have.” Clare lies down again, her head in William’s lap, her feet up on the sofa’s arm. William looks down into her eyes, unsmiling, and she looks away.
    Maybe, Clare thinks, when Isabel and David return, William will have migrated back to the armchair, reading something high-toned, and I will be resting, attractively, or reading, attractively. And when Charles comes back, he’ll find the four of us talking over drinks and eating the goat cheese and crackers that Isabel brought. He’ll join us. He’ll put his hand on my horrible hair, as if it is nice hair, and he’ll sit where William is sitting now.
    It is such a golden picture, the five of them. The six of them—Clare pictures Nelson, too, sitting on the other side of her, in a clean shirt, holding a couple of the cookies she’d forgotten to put out for him before. The light shines on Charles’s lovely Nordic hair, a mix of blond and gray, as if the boy and the man will coexist forever, and Isabel is bringing out the best in everyone in her kindest, most encouraging way, as if all she has ever wanted is to help Clare make a nice party, and David tells his stories of Second Avenue, and there is nothing in them, not Great-Aunt Frieda, not the death of little cousin Renee, to make Clare cry, and William tells her that he will love her forever, that nothing has been lost, after all, and he mouths the words so that no one can hear him, but her, of course, and it is so beautiful, so drenched in the lush, streaming light of what is not, she closes her eyes to see it better and falls asleep.
    William relaxes. There really is nothing more to do. He can just close his eyes, too. Clare’s hair fans out across his lap. Her hands press his to her chest. The objects in the room darken, until it is a black reef from couch to table to chair, and no one turns on the light. William and Clare sleep, as if it is a quiet night in their own home, as if they are lying naked and familiar in their own bed.

COMPASSION AND MERCY
For JOB
    No power.
    The roads were thick with pine branches and whole birch trees, the heavy boughs breaking off and landing on top of houses and cars and in front of driveways. The low, looping power lines coiled onto the road, and even from their bedroom window, Clare could see silver branches dangling in the icy wires. Highways were closed. Classes were canceled. The phone didn’t work. The front steps were slippery as hell.
    William kept a fire going in the living room and Clare toasted rye bread on the end of fondue forks for breakfast, and in the early afternoon, they wrapped cheese sandwiches in tin foil and threw them into the embers for fifteen minutes. William was in charge of dinner and making hot water for Thai ginger soup-in-a-bowl. They used the snow bank at the kitchen door to chill the Chardonnay.
    They read and played Scrabble and at four o’clock, when daylight dropped to a deep