Duma Key Read Free Page A

Jell-O.
    â€œYou want a divorce, you can have a divorce. Throw it all away, why not? Only go do the alligator somewhere else. Get out of here.”
    She went up the stairs and closed the door without looking back. And it wasn’t until she was gone that I realized I’d meant to say crocodile tears. Go cry your crocodile tears somewhere else.
    Oh, well. Close enough for rock and roll. That’s what Wireman says.
    And I was the one who ended up getting out.
    iii
    Except for Pam, I never had a partner in my other life. Edgar Freemantle’s Four Rules for Success (feel free totake notes) were: never borrow more than your IQ times a hundred, never borrow from a man who calls you by your first name on first acquaintance, never take a drink while the sun’s still up, and never take a partner you wouldn’t be willing to embrace naked on a waterbed.
    I did have an accountant I trusted, however, and it was Tom Riley who helped me move the few things I needed from Mendota Heights to our smaller place on Lake Phalen. Tom, a sad two-time loser in the marriage game, worried at me all the way out. “You don’t give up the house in a situation like this,” he said. “Not unless the judge kicks you out. It’s like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game.”
    I didn’t care about home field advantage; I only wanted him to watch his driving. I winced every time a car coming the other way looked a little too close to the centerline. Sometimes I stiffened and pumped the invisible passenger brake. As for getting behind the wheel again myself, I thought never sounded about right. Of course, God loves surprises. That’s what Wireman says.
    Kathi Green the Rehab Queen had only been divorced once, but she and Tom were on the same wavelength. I remember her sitting cross-legged in her leotard, holding my feet and looking at me with grim outrage.
    â€œHere you are, just out of Death’s Motel and short an arm, and she wants to call it off. Because you poked her with a plastic hospital knife when you could barely remember your own name? Fuck me til I cry! Doesn’t she understand that mood-swings and short-term memory loss following accident trauma are common ?”
    â€œShe understands that she’s scared of me,” I said.
    â€œYeah? Well, listen to your Mama, Sunny Jim: if you’ve got a good lawyer, you can make her pay for being such a wimp.” Some hair had escaped from her Rehab Gestapo ponytail and she blew it back from her forehead. “She ought to pay for it. Read my lips: None of this is your fault .”
    â€œShe says I tried to choke her.”
    â€œAnd if so, being choked by a one-armed invalid must have been a pants-wetting experience. Come on, Eddie, make her pay. I’m sure I’m stepping way out of my place, but I don’t care. She should not be doing what she’s doing.”
    â€œI think there’s more to it than the choking thing and the butter-knife thing.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI can’t remember.”
    â€œWhat does she say?”
    â€œShe doesn’t.” But Pam and I had been together a long time, and even if love had run out into a delta of passive acceptance, I thought I still knew her well enough to know that yes—there had been something else, there was still something else, and that was what she wanted to get away from.
    iv
    Not long after I relocated to the place on Lake Phalen, the girls came to see me—the young women. They brought a picnic hamper. We sat on the piney-smelling lakeporch, looked out at the lake, and nibbled sandwiches. It was past Labor Day by then, most of the floating toys put away for another year. There wasalso a bottle of wine in the hamper, but I only drank a little. On top of the pain medication, alcohol hit me hard; a single beer could turn me into a slurring drunk. The girls—the young women —finished the rest between them, and it loosened them up.