The Fury of Rachel Monette Read Free Page A

is.”
    â€œIt is not.”
    â€œIt is. Bill Rodgers says so.”
    â€œHe does not, Mummy.” They went to fetch the shovels, too late to be of any use to the mailman, a gaunt Vermonter who was making his way with difficulty up the walk.
    â€œYou should get this walk cleared,” he said, handing Rachel a letter. “The law says the mailman is not obligated to negotiate an uncleared access.”
    â€œSorry.” She took it from him. The return address said Leonine Investments, 1550 Fifth Avenue, New York. It would contain a quarterly dividend. Leonine Investments was her father’s frozen fish.
    Quickly the shoveling degenerated into a game which involved tossing snow high into the air and watching Garth jump at it, snapping. Rachel brushed the snow from the windshield of the little Japanese station wagon.
    â€œYou’re really going in this?” she asked.
    â€œSure. It’s what makes tough guys tough. Right, Adam?”
    â€œRight.” They leaned on their shovels.
    â€œOkay, tough guys. Breakfast’s on the table and there’s fresh O.J. in the fridge.” She walked over to Dan to kiss him goodbye. There were dark smudges under his eyes.
    â€œYou didn’t sleep well.”
    An odd look surfaced in his eyes. “Not very.” He lowered his voice so Adam wouldn’t hear. “I even had a nightmare, if you can believe it.”
    â€œI’m not surprised, with all the booze you drank. What was it about?”
    â€œNothing really. I’ll tell you later.”
    â€œWas Tom Dawkins in it?”
    He laughed. “It wasn’t that scary.”
    She kissed him on the lips. “The run will do you good. Don’t be late for school, Adam.” The school was a few hundred yards away, on the road to town.
    Rachel backed the car out of the drive. As she drove off she saw them in the rearview mirror, running along the road: Dan in the lead with his long-legged lope and Adam falling behind but going as quickly as his little legs would carry him, more graceful than his father. Garth stayed right beside Adam.

2
    Rachel touched the play button and the girl said, “I gave up the baby because my father beat the shit out of me when he saw it was half black, you know?” It was a problem. Using the fast forward Rachel searched through the tape until she heard the girl saying, “It’s all a load of crap no matter what the social workers tell you.” With her hands on the reels Rachel slowly moved the word “crap” across the tape head, bracketing it with a grease pencil. She lay the tape in the editing block and cut along the two lines with a razor blade. She spliced the tape with a piece of adhesive, rewound to “beat the shit,” isolated “shit” with the grease pencil, excised it and replaced it with “crap.” “Crap” was half an inch longer than “shit”: she supposed it was due to the girl’s drawl. She stuck on the adhesive, rewound and heard, “… father beat the crap out of me.” The intonations matched. “Crap” wasn’t as strong, and it wasn’t what the girl had said when Rachel held the microphone in front of her in the dingy room, but it would play in the high schools of Massachusetts and “shit” wouldn’t. That’s what they meant by editorial judgment.
    Rachel rubbed her eyes. The fluorescent lights hurt them. As did, come to think of it, the flaking yellow paint on the walls of the editing cubicle, and the poster advertising a forgotten concert by a forgotten folk singer. Once, in her last year of high school, she had an orgasm while listening to one of his songs. More than any adolescent longing it had probably been due to the two-hundred-dollar earphones her father had given her, or marijuana bought in the girls’ washroom. The episode seemed incredible to her now.
    Andy Monteith opened the door and leaned in. “Thanks