Trap Door Read Free Page B

if it blew me up, too, I might not have minded very much. Because the alternative was repairing the house, which as a personal-injury generator was already showing itself to be (a) efficient and (b) murderously creative.
    Meanwhile, my ability in the happily-ever-after department looked doubtful as well. For instance, back in the city I’d just finished divorcing a guy whose idea of faithfulness consisted of leaving his wedding ring on his finger while he slept with other women, an activity he pursued so regularly you’d have thought he’d entered a contest, and if there’d been one for most commandments broken in a single marriage, Victor would have won it.
    And I had Sam, whose idea of sobriety was… well, I’m not sure what my son’s notion of sobriety consisted of then. Before we moved here he was mostly too drunk, too stoned, or too strung out to think much about it at all; at age thirteen, his liver most likely resembled a pickled herring, his eyes were so bloodshot and frantic that they looked as if they belonged on a cartoon character, and as for his brain, I preferred not to imagine its probable condition.
    And I wasn’t feeling so good myself. Until coming to Eastport, we’d lived in Manhattan in a building so exclusive, it took genetic testing to get approved to move in. Afterwards, though, the standards of behavior in the place were so trashy—fights, screaming, howled threats to actually
cut up the goddamned charge cards
—I thought they should have parked junk cars out front and set up a broken washing machine in the lobby beside the potted palm.
    But never mind, it was a roof over our heads and it’s not as if I didn’t have plenty of trashy troubles of my own. Victor’s girlfriends, for instance, had gotten the idea that I was their pal, a sort of comrade-in-arms in the sordid little romantic tragicomedy they shared with my husband, instead of a person who badly wanted to bash all their heads together.
    Victor liked girls who were dewy-eyed and innocent, ignoring the fact that by the time he got through with them they’d be such bitter harpies, the only way to get near them was with a diamond bracelet dangling at the end of a long, sharp stick.
    Often they called me weeping, two or three of them at a time—one of the girls, I gathered, had sounded out the words in the phone book where it gave instructions on how to make a conference call, and she’d taught all the others—complaining about what an awful son of a bitch Victor was.
    Like maybe I didn’t know that. I felt like asking them, since he made no secret of the fact that he was married, who the hell they had been expecting, the Dalai Lama? That maybe by some miracle he wouldn’t leave them twisting in the wind the way he’d left me?
    I mean unless he needed something: his good shirts sent to the laundry, say, or a button sewn on. Then he’d stay home just long enough for me to start believing that this time, everything might somehow miraculously manage to turn out hunky-dory.
    After a while I started sabotaging those buttons, getting up in the wee hours to hide in the utility closet with a flashlight and cuticle scissors, snipping half the threads on each one from behind where it wouldn’t show. That’s how desperate I’d become: hotshot money manager by day, button snipper by night.
    Oh yes, I had a career, too, mostly based on the same variety of freakish inborn talent that produces perfect pitch, double-jointedness, and the ability to win at poker by memorizing all the cards and the odds. In short, at the time I was the kind of money management magician who could make a nickel walk smoothly across the tops of my knuckles, and by the time it got to my little finger it would be a silver dollar.
    Too bad the folks for whom I made fortunes were the kind I’d have preferred not to spend much time around; not unless I’d drenched myself with holy water and equipped myself with a mallet and wooden stake. Because let’s face it, my