Duane's Depressed Read Free Page B

Aitken, largely because her own children had done their best to make him a rich man, and had largely succeeded.
    Bobby Lee was right about Ruth and the magnifying glass, though. All she could see when she held the crossword puzzle book under the glass was an occasional wavy line.
    “It’s all right,” Duane invariably said, when some busybody pointed out that he was employing a blind woman who sat in a corner all day pretending to do crossword puzzles. “Moving the magnifying glass back and forth gives her a little something to do.” A young secretary named Earlene did all the actual secretarying. Earlene and Ruth did not have a harmonious relationship, mainly because Ruth would sneak over during Earlene’s lunch break and hide whatever lease orders Earlene had been working on when she left for lunch.
    “I’m just testing her,” Ruth said, when Duane chided her about this habit. “A good secretary ought to be able to find anything in this office in three minutes, hidden or not.”
    “Even if you hid it in your car?” Duane asked—though almost blind, Ruth still drove herself to work, making use of a tortuous network of back alleys and avoiding all contact with what she called the “big roads.” The worst she had done so far was knock down a row of garbage cans.
    “Well, if it’s in my car I guess it’s stuff I need to work on myself, in the peace of my home,” Ruth informed him. She did not enjoy having her methods questioned—she never had.
    “Where’s Duane?” Karla asked, peeking into the office.
    Earlene was typing and Ruth was swiveling her magnifying glass back and forth. She had just caught a glimpse of the word “Mississippi,” an excellent word, and she wanted to count the letters and see if she could fit it into her puzzle anyplace. Karla’s sudden entry caused her dictionary to fall off her knee.
    “Ain’t here; he just stuck his head in the door and said he was going to the cabin,” Earlene said, without lifting her eyes from the lease contract she was typing.
    The cabin was just a frame shack Duane had built a few years ago, when all their kids and grandkids were temporarily living at home. Nellie, Dickie, and Julie were all in the process of quarrelsome divorces, and Jack—Julie’s twin—was serving a twelve-month probation for possession of a controlled substance, in this case four thousand methamphetamine tablets. All the grandchildren liked living in their grandparents’ big house, though Nellie’s two oldest, Barbette and Little Mike, preferred living in a commune in Oregon, where they had been for the last three years. The children themselves hated living at home and were constantly at one another’s throats. Karla, who was auditing a few courses at Midwestern University at the time, audited one in art history and came home one day eager to explain a few new concepts to Duane.
    “Now Baroque came along in real old-timey times,” she explained one morning, after an evening when they had both underestimated the force of some tequila they were drinking, withthe stereo in their bedroom turned up high enough to drown out the sounds of Nellie screaming at T.C., her boyfriend of the moment.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Duane said. He didn’t mind Karla auditing courses—in fact, he encouraged it—but he did mind having to audit her auditings, particularly when he had a hangover.
    “Baroque, Duane—Baroque,” Karla said. It always pleased her to learn a complicated new word that no one else in Thalia knew the meaning of.
    “I heard you. What does it mean?” he asked.
    “Well, it kinda means ‘too much,’ you know?” Karla said, thinking that was probably the simplest way to explain it to someone like Duane, who had never given ten seconds’ thought to art of any kind, unless it was just pictures of cowboys loping around in the snow or something.
    “Okay, too much,” Duane said. He was slightly addicted to antihistamine nose sprays at the