Read Online A Stranger Like You by Elizabeth Brundage - Free Book Online

anything.
    “Hugh?”
    “Look,” he said. “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know how to say this—I mean—I wanted to tell you in person.”
    “Tell me what?”
    “Look, it’s not working out.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Us. Our marriage.”
    “What are you saying, Hughie? What are you saying ?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
    “It’s because of me, isn’t it? It’s because I can’t—”
    “It’s not because of that,” he cut her off. “It has nothing to do with that.”
    “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
    “Do what you always do.” He pictured her twirling stem-tape on roses, watering all the plants in the greenhouse where she worked. Sometimes she came home with her fingertips pricked. When things were better between them, he would take her hands and kiss the tiny wounds.
    “They called from work,” she said. “I told them you were sick.”
    I am sick, he thought. I’m very ill.
    “Why didn’t you tell me about the promotion? They think it’s why you’re not there. They think you’re upset.”
    “She was more qualified for the job,” he said. “I’ve come to terms with it.”
    “But you’ve been there longer, Hughie. It wasn’t fair.”
    Marion didn’t know the whole truth about why he hadn’t gotten the promotion. He’d made the mistake of making a pass at his competitor, a neatly wrapped blonde in a JCPenney suit. It had been a foolish thing to do, he understood that fully now, and yet at the time, after drinking half a dozen martinis at the annual Christmas party, he’d felt pretty certain that their interest in each other was mutual. In retrospect, putting his hand on her ass under the festering gazes of his superiors probably wasn’t a great idea. He’d forced himself on her later in the coatroom, among the guileless hunkering overcoats of his coworkers. He’d had her pressed against the wall, fragrant and ripe—and then she’d come to her senses. She’d slapped him across the face and walked out, threatening to sue him for sexual harassment. Obviously, she’d used the mishap to her advantage.
    “She has her MBA. Look, it’s out of my hands.” The traffic came to a sudden halt; he had to slam on his brakes. He watched the people in the car behind him take the jolt. The lights of an ambulance flared in his rearview mirror. The promotion would have meant a lot more money, a better office on a better floor. More vacation time. His own assistant. “I didn’t want it anyway,” he lied.
    His wife didn’t say anything and for a moment he wondered if he’d lost her.
    “Marion? Are you there?”
    “I feel like I’m disappearing. You don’t see me anymore.”
    “Don’t be so dramatic.”
    “We used to be fine. We were fine before you left.”
    We were not fine. “Look, Marion, I have to go.”
    “Hughie, please.”
    “I’ll call you tomorrow.” He closed his phone, disconnecting the call. It wasn’t nice, he knew, to hang up on his wife. As a result, she would be up all night, and yet he didn’t care. He was glad he wasn’t with her—glad he would never return to their stilted little house with its singing Disney birds and garbage cans or to his cubicle on the thirtieth floor of the tower of immutable suffering otherwise known as the Equitable Life Insurance Company. The truth of it was he didn’t give a good goddamn about the promotion.
    An ambulance reeled past. The cars inched along. Finally, he passed the accident. A car had smashed into the divider. Luckily, his was the next exit. Once off the freeway, the road was clear. He pulled into the airport and wound up to long-term parking, just as he had done earlier that afternoon. The alcohol had given him a headache, and he felt slightly disoriented as he passed through the gate. He drove over to section H. Some of the streetlights were blinking and when he put his window down he could hear the buzzing of electricity and it made him consider