Listen to Me Read Free

two, maybe a shake of hands with the incoming grad students—enough to show he wasn’t aloof—then head off to the Tabard Inn, where he would have a late dinner and continue a recent flirtation with a bartender from Poland. She couldn’t mix a drink, but she could pour gin over ice and she spoke with an accent that had caused Mark more than once to clutch his chest in sweet agony and say, “Hand to god. Your voice hurts me to my heart.”
    Georgetown hadn’t secured the entirety of the boat—already budgets were tightening—and so a second party was also being hosted that night by a different school, which was how it happened that Mark caught Maggie’s eye. Complete serendipity. She was in her final year of the veterinary program at Howard University. She was remarkably tall and, that night, dressed in a sort of Annie Hall get-up that was several decades too late, but what initially attracted Mark to Maggie—what caused him to introduce himself in the first place—was an off-kilter gap between her two front teeth, which she exposed—seemingly without embarrassment—whenever she laughed. He assumed she’d been raised either in extreme poverty or extreme wealth.
    What he liked best about getting together with Maggie those first few months of dating was the way she would—in public or private—seek out direct eye contact. At parties, at dinner, stretching in the park after a run together, he would sometimes find her watching him, which in turn would lead to him watching her, and the two of them might continue to watch each other, no words spoken at all. There was something animal about Maggie, and it made Mark feel there was something animal about him—a sensation he’d never before known to crave. She was as different as could be from his cohort at school.
    Maggie, it turned out, was from a family that was neither outrageously advantaged nor incredibly poor. Instead, hers was a lower-middle-class childhood—“more lower than middle,” she liked to say—in the “upper middle of America” (Minnesota), where she’d been raised by a “brilliant but hateful” woman and a “handsome but unintelligent” man. Her older brother was an alcoholic who’d been given the little attention her parents could muster. Maggie was the daughter they hadn’t planned on and, as such, the one who received primary blame for any money woes the family might encounter. “And we were always encountering money woes,” she said. “But it’s not as though we had nothing.”
    What was a wonder to Mark—a gift really—was the way that Maggie, rather than making him feel ashamed or embarrassed by his own privilege and upbringing, instead made him feel proud, lucky. She was always asking questions about his parents, always wanting to know more about his evening routines as a child—dinner at the table, followed by a walk in the woods with his parents, followed by reading aloud in front of the fire. Never before Maggie had he enjoyed sharing these stories, fearing always that he would be ridiculed and that his childhood might be deemed precious or out-of-touch.
    And, yes, obviously those were the early days of courtship, and early days of any relationship mellow out, soften, dilute themselves into something more ordinary, less extreme, more ubiquitously accessible. Their relationship was no different than others in this regard, except that between them they retained a sincere fondness, a genuine gratefulness that the other existed and continued to exist.
    But ever since that college girl’s death and, subsequently, the visit from the cops, Maggie had been spending most of her time at home and in a flannel robe. Mark had no idea where she’d even gotten the thing. He only knew that one day, about two weeks ago, he’d come home from work and she was wearing it. One of those plaid L.L.Bean jobs. At