The Things We Do for Love Read Free

counseling women in trouble, getting them to take advantage of the center’s resources. But every time a woman finally made the decision to leave a partner, Cameron felt so much empathy it was as if she, herself, had endured the ordeals. The husband who disassembled the car to prevent his wife from using it to flee. The cop boyfriend who sat with his service revolver, threatening suicide, in front of the single mother and her three-year-old. Then, there were the calls from men. Threats against her, every employee of the women’s resource center, the ex-spouses and ex-girlfriends, the runaway wife, the volunteer.
    Graham Corbett, Cameron reflected again, would be the perfect man for her. He was kind on his show, and he gave damned good advice. No way could Cameron imagine him turning into a controlling, possessive type. And he was smart.
    Cameron suspected that Graham had the hots for Mary Anne. She’d felt the currents running between them. She even wondered if Mary Anne felt it, too, but was in denial, too fixated on Jonathan. Besides, Mary Anne’s father was an actor and musician, an attractive celebrity whose exploits had been covered in international tabloids, a big deal. Mary Anne detested this, and she was never going to go for a man who lived and worked in the public eye.
    The love potion had been a fun idea. But a deep part of Cameron badly wanted Mary Anne to succeed with Jonathan, for the simple reason that she herself wanted the chance to date and get to know Graham Corbett—who clearly preferred her cousin.
    She should forget the radio star.
    Her cell phone rang and she looked at the screen.
    Mary Anne.
    Cameron smiled and answered, wondering if she was going to learn that her cousin was willing to try a love potion after all.
     
    “W HAT ARE YOU KEEPING those for?” obstetrician David Cureux asked his ex-wife. He had followed Clare into her basement to discover an entire bookcase stocked with foam meat trays. Those were not the only things stored in the basement. There were old magazines, including every copy of Midwifery Today ever printed, a stash of gift boxes that took up twenty-four cubic feet of space, the infamous box of rubber bands, another of twisty ties. The woman never threw anything away, but for the life of him David had no idea what she planned to do with those meat trays.
    “We’ll need these things when it all falls apart,” she said.
    It, David knew from long and turbulent experience with this woman, was civilization as they knew it. She’d raised two children, who now spoke with a sort of hushed horror of growing up amidst the ominous predictions of a woman they still believed to be a seer, even though they’d finally learned to tune out her prognostications of global disaster.
    “I guess you could put them together with duct tape and build yourself a house,” he reflected of the meat trays. “Or a coliseum.”
    “Never mind that. Let’s move these upstairs.”
    These were more than twenty boxes too heavy for the sixty-eight-year-old woman to carry up the cellar steps by herself. They contained telephone directories for the years 1968 to 2005. Not just phone directories that had belonged to Clare, but most of the discarded phone directories for the state of West Virginia—or so David suspected.
    “I have to get this done,” Clare said, referring to the delivery of the boxes to recycling, which her ex-husband had promised to do with his pickup truck. Clare was reluctant to part with them, but she’d realized that every issue of Birth Journal could no longer be kept upstairs. So those magazines were coming downstairs and the phone books would have to leave. “We need to hurry. Someone’s coming about a love potion.”
    A person who knew Clare less well would draw one of the following conclusions: One, she’d made a previous appointment with someone who wanted a love potion. Or two, she’d received a phone message or written message asking her to be home at a particular