Listen to Me Read Free Page A

first it was a joke. Or Mark thought it was a joke, or at the very least something to joke about. Then one day—a week ago max—he’d been parking the car and there was Maggie, walking down the other side of the street with Gerome. She was wearing the robe. It was afternoon. It was daylight. Mark had a sudden sinking feeling that he was married to a loser.
    Maggie had an excuse for her behavior, but it was getting old. It was getting old in part because she’d been getting better. The symptoms now felt disproportionate to the cause. Like, for instance, Patricia Hatchett, who was also in the History Department, had lost a baby last year, and Mark wasn’t the only one to notice that she looked better these days than ever. He’d heard she was considering a run for chair, for Christ’s sake. It embarrassed Mark that his wife had become a completely different person just because she’d been mugged. Strike that—because someone they didn’t even know had been murdered. But what was becoming more and more apparent—and this wasn’t a happy or an easy realization—was that Mark was spending his life with one of the world’s weaklings: the type of person who gets diagnosed with cancer and, instead of going outside and taking on life, gets in bed and waits for the inevitable. He’d expected more from Maggie. My god, he’d expected so much more!
    How the mugging happened—what Maggie told Mark—went like this: she’d gotten off the Red Line at Berwyn. Same stop as always. It was getting dark but it wasn’t late. She crossed Broadway and started into the neighborhood. A man was waiting at the first alley. He asked for change. She ignored him, kept walking. He followed. It was their neighborhood—
their
neighborhood: middle-upper class, lots of grass!—she didn’t think anything of the fact that he was following her. She was three blocks from Clark Street. Three blocks from the coffee shop and their apartment and the dinner that Mark had made for them. By the next alley, though, the man had caught up to her. “Hey,” he said. He tapped her on the shoulder. Not even this had set off bells that she was dealing with anything more than a simple panhandler, a meager beggar. “The purse,” he said. He pointed to her bag. Her wallet and computer were inside. She laughed. “No way, dude,” she said. “Sorry.” She turned to walk away.
    She claimed she didn’t originally see the gun, but later—after a young couple had found her and called the cops and taken her to the emergency room—when they showed her photos of the bruise on the back of her neck, of the perfect outline of the butt of a gun, she said the gun had become a part of the memory. Whether it was a trick of the imagination or a real recollection had been jogged somehow, she didn’t know. But ever since seeing the photos, she remembered the gun.
    Not too long ago, as the winter yielded to spring, she’d gotten to the point where she was making jokes about the whole thing. She’d been fucking adorable with the story. Like, okay, at a dinner party five weeks ago—
five weeks ago!
—she’d been the belle of the ball. She told the anecdote three, maybe four times. She was a hit. A trouper. A riot. They all loved the way she’d said, “No way, dude.” Nadeem Gnechik had stopped Mark in the hallway the next day and said, “Your wife’s a goddamn battle-ax.” They shared a laugh and Mark thought to himself,
Yes.
He thought,
A battle-ax—my wife.
He thought,
I’m a goddamn lucky man.
    But then, with the arrival of those cops and their photos, out came the flannel robe.
    Last week he found two bottles of mace in the dog-walking drawer and an application for a concealed carry permit. He’d torn the paper up and pushed it to the bottom of the trash.
    Just three mornings ago, on her side of the bed, he