Duane's Depressed Read Free

had ended up in Texas when her passionate romance with a crop duster named Woody suddenly lost altitude and deposited her on a dusty corner by Highway 79.
    “Well, I just thought somebody might have died this morning,”Karla said. “Most people seem to die in the morning rather than the afternoon—I don’t know why that is.”
    “Nope, nobody died—not that there ain’t two or three ignorant sons-of-bitches around here who deserve to have their asses killed.” She was thinking particularly of Woody, who lived a few blocks away with a redhead he had formed an unseemly relationship with.
    “Well, I just wondered. Bye,” Karla said, and hung up. She didn’t want to give Mildred-Jean an opportunity to start in about Woody—hearing about other men’s treachery was not likely to help quell her panic attack, not while her husband, a male himself, was wandering the streets.
    “Maybe aliens came down in a spaceship and took possession of Pa-Pa’s mind,” Willy offered, helpfully. He was resting his fingers again.
    “It could be aliens but I bet it’s oil,” Karla said. She raced into her bedroom and shot the TV by her bed all the way up the cable to the Financial Channel, convinced that the Saudis had opened the floodgates at last, producing a tidal wave of oil that would drop the price of West Texas crude to around two dollars a barrel, ruining everybody in Texas, or at least everybody in Thalia. Anxiety about the Saudi tidal wave had been a constant in the oil patch for years; nobody knew when it would come but everyone agreed that once it did come, ruin would be complete: no more platinum AmEx cards, no more frequent-flier miles, no more fun trips to Las Vegas or Bossier City.
    Apparently, though, the tidal wave still hadn’t come. The commentators on the Financial Channel evinced no sign of panic.
    If it’s not death and it’s not oil I guess he wants a divorce, Karla thought. No sooner had the notion entered her head than the last few barricades separating reason from panic were swept aside. He wanted a divorce: she knew it, should have known it immediately. There wasn’t anything wrong with Duane: he just wanted a divorce and was too chicken to come in the house and spit it out.
    Julie was in the kitchen making herself and Bubbles baconsandwiches when Karla wandered in, looking for her car keys. Now that she knew what the truth was she was in no special hurry to go chase her husband down.
    “Bacon sandwiches, I love ’em,” Bubbles said. “I wish they’d kill every pig in the world so there’d always be plenty of bacon sandwiches.”
    Bubbles, eight, had frizzy blonde hair and a blue-eyed gaze that melted the hardest hearts.
    “I don’t think the world needs to lose a whole species of animal just so you can stuff yourself with grease, Miss Bubbles,” Karla said.
    Bubbles regarded her grandmother coolly. They did not always see eye to eye.
    “You shut up that talk or I’ll never hug your wrinkled old neck again,” Bubbles said, although without rancor. She was dipping a table knife into a big jar of Miracle Whip and licking the Miracle Whip off the knife blade.
    “Thanks a lot. Who bought you that stupid purple dinosaur you sleep with?” Karla said, as she stood in the door. She glanced at Julie, hoping her daughter would offer Bubbles a word or two of correction, but Julie was gazing absently out the window, wondering what she was going to do for fun until Darren Connor got out of jail.
    “If she’s this rude at eight, what’s she going to be like at fifteen?” Karla asked. “You need to be thinking about things like that, Julie, instead of just wasting your life on violent criminals.”
    “Bacon and Miracle Whip and Barney are the three best things in the whole world,” Bubbles said airily, waving the knife around as if it were a wand.
    Julie was wishing her mother would leave, so she could pop an upper—handling her kids in the morning was really tiring work.
    Once in her little