Breathing Lessons Read Free

believe any directions of Serena's could get us where we'd care to go? Ha! We'd find ourselves in Canada someplace. We'd be off in Arizona!" "Well, you don't have to get so excited about it." "We would never see home again," Ira said.
Maggie shook her billfold and a pack of Kleenex from her purse.
"Serena's the one who made us late for her own wedding reception, remember that?" Ira said. "At that crazy little banquet hall we spent an hour locating." "Really, Ira. You always act like women are such flibbertigibbets," Maggie said. She gave up searching through her purse; evidently she had mislaid Serena's directions as well. She said, "It's Fiona's own good I'm thinking of. She'll need us to baby-sit." "Baby-sit?" "During the honeymoon." He gave her a look that she couldn't quite read.
"She's getting married next Saturday," Maggie said. "You can't take a seven-year-old on a honeymoon." He still said nothing.
They were out beyond the city limits now and the houses had thinned. They passed a used-car lot, a scratchy bit of woods, a shopping mall with a few scattered early-bird cars parked on a concrete wasteland. Ira started whistling. Maggie stopped fiddling with her purse straps and grew still.
There were times when Ira didn't say a dozen words all day, and even when he did talk you couldn't guess what he was feeling. He was a closed-in, isolated man- his most serious flaw. But what he failed to realize was, his whistling could tell the whole story. For instance-an unsettling example-after a terrible fight in the early days of their marriage they had more or less smoothed things over, patted them into place again, and then he'd gone off to work whistling a song she couldn't identify. It wasn't till later that the words occurred to her. / wonder if I care as much, was the way they went, as I did before. . . .
But often the association was something trivial, something circumstantial-"This Old House" while he tackled a minor repair job, or "The Wichita Lineman" whenever he helped bring in the laundry.. Do, do that voodoo . . . he whistled unknowingly, five minutes after circling a pile of dog do on the sidewalk. And of course there were times when Maggie had no idea what he was whistling. This piece right now, say: something sort of croony, something they might play on WLIF. Well, maybe he'd merely heard it while shaving, in which case it meant nothing at all.
A Patsy Cline song; that's what it was. Patsy Cline's "Crazy." She sat up sharply and said, "Perfectly sane people baby-sit their grandchildren, Ira Moran." He looked startled.
"They keep them for months. Whole summers," she told him.
He said, "They don't pay drop-in visits, though." "Certainly they do!" "Ann Landers claims drop-in visits are inconsiderate," he said.
Ann Landers, his personal heroine.
"And it's not like we're blood relatives," he said. "We're not even Fiona's in-laws anymore." "We're Leroy's grandparents till the day we die," Maggie told him.
He didn't have any answer for that.
This stretch of road was such a mess. Things had been allowed to just happen-a barbecue joint sprouting here, a swim-pool display room there. A pickup parked on the shoulder overflowed with pumpkins: ALL u CAN CARRY $., the hand-lettered sign read. The pumpkins reminded Maggie of fall, but in fact it was so warm now that a line of moisture stood out on her upper lip. She rolled down her window, recoiled from the hot air, and rolled it up again. Anyway, enough of a breeze came from Ira's side. He drove one-handed, with his left elbow jutting over the sill. The sleeves of his suit had rucked up to show his wristbones.
Serena used to say Ira was a mystery. That was a compliment, in those days. Maggie wasn't even dating Ira, she was engaged to someone else, but Serena kept saying, "How can you resist him? He's such a mystery. He's so mysterious." "I don't have to resist him. He's not after me," Maggie had said. Although she had wondered. (Serena was right. He was such a