If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read Free Page B

wife’s complaints about him. The therapist had inhaled and exhaled so slowly and completely that the breeze of it fluttered the pages of the notebook on his lap.
    “Separation,” the therapist had said. “I don’t usually give this kind of, well, specific advice, but I’ve listened to both of you for three weeks now, and I think that—”
    His wife was nodding (nodding, nodding, nodding) beside him. Tony could hear her earrings make a muffled rattling in her hair. She was all dressed up—pantyhose, high heels—and since she’d come straight from dropping their daughter off at school and was going straight home to read books about relationships and talk to her best friend on the phone, Tony had to assume she’d dressed up for the therapist.
    Still, he wasn’t jealous about that. The guy was frankly ugly—bulbous nose, shiny lips—so Tony doubted that his wife had dressed up because she had the hots for their marriage counselor. Instead, he figured, Melody was showing the whole world what a lovely piece of work she was: a woman who could have had any man she’d wanted, but who’d chosen, mistakenly, this idiot sitting next to her in a marriage counselor’s office.
    The pantyhose, especially. Tony wanted to turn and slug her hard in the face because of those pantyhose, but he also didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. He knew she’d just jump out of her seat with a big smile on her face pointing at him, looking to the therapist, bleeding and screaming, “See! See what I mean!”
    And in truth Tony had never once hit another living human being. He’d beaten up his sister’s stuffed panda once after his sister was dead, but even that had felt wrong and he’d ended up sobbing into its dusty smelling fur, begging it to forgive him.
    “It seems to me,” the therapist had gone on, “that you’ve come to a crossroads—”
    “Shut up,” Tony had said, “ enough ,” to which the therapist sat up straighter and opened his eyes wider, looking as if he’d just snapped out of a dream—a dream in which he’d been filing forms and listening to Muzak, maybe naked.
    “ Tony! ” Melody said, turning on him so fast he could tell she’d been waiting to do it all along.
    “Bullshit,” Tony had said. “I’m not paying this asshole seventy-five dollars an hour to tell me to get a separation. I’m paying him to fix this fucking marriage .”
    It was all he could think of to say. Really, he wasn’t sure what he was paying the asshole for. He wasn’t so stupid he really believed a marriage counselor could “fix” a marriage. Maybe marriage counselors were paid to tell you to separate. Maybe, for fuck’s sake, that was the best thing to do when you came to these “crossroads.” God knew that that he, Tony Harmon, didn’t know.
    But, desperately, Tony didn’t want to do anything . He was completely happy with his marriage exactly the way it was .
    Tony rounded another corner:
    There was his house.
    He tried to walk more slowly, look around him as he walked. La. La. La. Sky. Bush. Sidewalk. Then, stabbing light off the chrome of some bitch’s bumper got him right in the eye, and although he looked away as quickly as he could, for a good ten seconds he was a blind man. When he could see again he found himself halfway down the block to his house, blinking at the black silhouettes of two women in his driveway.
    Witches bent over some brew. Or suburban matrons spinning their car keys on their fingers.
    Was it his imagination or did they drop their voices to hushed whispers when they saw him?
    He kept walking, kept blinking, and the two silhouettes—taking on details now: fatness, thinness, lipstick—kept staring at him as if they didn’t recognize him.
    “Hi. I’m the birthday girl’s father,” he called out to them, and they laughed then, darting nervous glances at one another. The slim and attractive one seemed to look meaningfully at the one with an ass the size of her minivan’s bumper. They