Signs and Wonders Read Free Page B

erase the irritation caused by your wife’s voice. With all the troubled intimacy of their twenty-sixyears together she knew this. And this same knowledge also bound them, making her come back every single day to visit this trussed chicken who had been her lover and her companion and her enemy. Because she was all he had left.
    At home that night, a little tipsy, she called Dave. “It’s Kathleen,” she said.
    There was a pause.
    “Terry’s wife,” she said.
    “Oh, right,” he said. It was ten o’clock, and he also sounded drunk. “Everything okay? I mean, how’s Terry?”
    “He’s the same. Why haven’t you been to see him? You’re his best friend.”
    There was another pause. “I am?” he said.
    “Jesus,” she said. “Listen, I have to ask you something and I need you to be honest. For Terry’s sake.”
    She had a memory of Dave, back when she and Terry still had parties, slipping a bottle of vodka to their son and shrugging afterward, saying that the longer you kept it away, the worse kids wanted it. They found poor Steve at three in the morning, puking in the park, and he swore he’d never again touch alcohol. Which was true, actually, he’d only snorted drugs, so maybe Dave wasn’t completely off base.
    “Sure, anything,” he was saying now.
    “Was Terry having an affair?”
    “Oh, Kathy,” he said. “No.”
    “I’m not asking for the reason you think I am,” she said. “I’m not
mad.
I just thought that if he was, he’d probably want her in the room, do you know what I mean? Instead of me? So I thoughtit would be nice to invite her or whatever. As a …” She stumbled to find the right word, then her mind seized it, brilliantly: “A mitzvah.”
    Dave, like Terry, was Jewish; Kathleen was Irish Catholic, though the question of religion was one they had always resolutely ignored. But Dave, right now, didn’t sound pleased to hear her use the word
mitzvah.
In fact, he sounded sober and annoyed. “There’s no girl, Kathy. Get some sleep.”
    She told him not to call her Kathy, but he’d already hung up.
    The notion of an affair preoccupied her for some time. In truth she suspected Fleur—nothing else, she thought, could explain her relentless visitation—yet there wasn’t anything in their conversations to support it; Fleur gave no indication of knowing anything more about Terry’s life than Kathleen did, and she had little curiosity about him, either. She only wanted to talk about Kathleen, her interests and opinions, her mental and physical health. She kept insisting that Kathleen had a life, against all evidence to the contrary. It was, frankly, more than a little weird.
    Summer came, and Fleur left town for two weeks to visit her family in Wisconsin. Kathleen had been looking forward to this Fleur-less time for ages. Finally she would have some peace. She wouldn’t watch any DVDs or read the newspaper or knit. She would sit around in her pajamas and be miserable without interruption or witness.
    It was an unpleasant surprise, then, to discover that she missed Fleur. She felt like she was going out of her mind, in fact. The days were formless, chaotic. Her visits to Terry seemed hollow because there was no one to report to about them. Her evenings collapsedinto drinking and endless crappy television—she was appalled by how much of it Terry used to watch; it was such an obvious cry for help—and she woke up at three a.m. sobbing with loneliness and despair.
    Dear God,
she thought.
Fleur Mason, whom I hate, is my best friend.
    When Fleur got back to town, she came over the next day. Kathleen had cleaned the house, baked muffins, and brewed coffee. Fleur took it all in stride. She described her vacation, then asked Kathleen about her family.
    Instead of answering, Kathleen said, “I have to tell you something.”
    Fleur set her muffin down. “Shoot,” she said.
    “I was the one who took your bird out of its cage,” Kathleen said. Even as she said it she wasn’t sure