Bank Robbers Read Free

EWHOUSE sat at the kitchen table and stared at the phone.
    What the hell did she want to come up bothering her for? She took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke hard, so it shot out in a stream at an angle.
    Miss High-and-Mighty.
    And all the men, they would swoon over her like she was some kind of delicate flower or goddamn queen.
    Well, Dottie O’Malley Weist was no queen.
    Oh yeah, she knew her. She always had these airs, as if she were better than the world, but Teresa knew it was all an act. For instance, she wouldn’t read the Star or the National Enquirer, like the rest of the world. Oh, no. She read “literature.”
    All those books she was always reading. The real thick kind, with the plastic library covers on ’em. She’d bury her nose in them and not talk to anyone else.
    But Teresa knew what the truth was about those.
    She wasn’t really readin ’em.
    She was just pretending. No one really reads those things. Says so right in all the newspapers all the time. Not with a kid and a husband to look after. It was just that she did it so good. Her eyes would actually move across the page as if she knew what all them words were, but Teresa had proof Dottie wasn’t really reading.
    Her lips didn’t move.
    And no one reads without moving the lips, this was a fact.
    Dottie fooled everybody, except for her, Teresa.
    She was a goddamned chorus girl, like the rest of ’em. Out there showing off her legs.
    And Nathan, when he first brought her around … she’d gotten Teresa’s best friend Margie kicked off the line, and Margie’d been with Nathan plenty. Poor little victim Margie hadn’t even seen her coming.
    And, wham, suddenly Dottie and Nathan are married?
    No. Teresa shook her head.
    And then she’d made Nathan miserable. “Get rid of her, Nat,” Fred had always told him. “What you do for a living ain’t good enough for her? Get rid of her. Have Teres’ set you up with someone nice. ”
    But Nathan, who was basically an okay guy, stuck it out with her. Jeez, Nathan Weist not good enough? If Teresa hadn’t already been married to Fred, she’d have gone for Nathan herself. She’d have been as proud of him as if he’d been president.
    Not that she hadn’t loved Fred. Oh no, she had, and she’d have never given him up for nobody. Her eyes began to dribble tears again the way they had for five solid weeks, and Teresa wiped them with the back of her hand and then squashed out her cigarette in the tray.
    Oh, God, Fred, she thought and then shook her head. She lit another cigarette to calm herself down. She sniffed and then tried to think of the things that had annoyed her about Fred. It made her feel better. If she thought about all the goodness in the man she’d go crazy from grief, so she’d surrounded herself with all the things he’d done that drove her nuts.
    Teresa took a sip on her coffee and grimaced. It was cold.
    Fred had been good to her, yes, but he had a lazy streak in him Nathan never had. Nathan would be at that club, cookin’ in the back room with Ben Zimmerman at all hours of the day and night. But Fred, well, every day on the dot of two-thirty, she’d have to throw him out of the house. Two-thirty was her cutoff, because the kids would be in from parochial school and they had agreed that he should always be gone when they got in.
    She’d brought her kids up right; it wasn’t good for children to see their father lying around the house like a bum all day, that was the way Teresa had always felt.
    And periodically she’d have to put Fred straight and she’d say, “I don’t care what it takes, we got a three-hundred-dollar grocery bill. You bring it home tonight so I don’t gotta go to Murphy’s on a Hun’-two, where the produce looks like crap.”
    And out Fred would go, maybe do a little hustlin’ or hijackin’ or crack