Read Online Affliction by Russell Banks - Free Book Online

ahead of it, he asked himself over and over, as if he had the answer lodged someplace in the back of his brain, why the hell the night had to work out like this. It could have been an ordinary and decent evening, just a divorced father spending time with his ten-year-old daughter. Not much to ask for. No big deal. Nothing complicated. Now the whole thing was a humiliating mess, and it was getting worse by the minute.
    The silver Audi kept ahead of the truck all the way into town. At the blinking yellow caution light in front of the school, with the truck less than a hundred yards behind it, the car, without slowing down, lurched around the heap of smashed pumpkins. Jack plowed straight through, splashing chunks and halves of pumpkin like orange slush into the air and off to the sides of the road, but he could not catch the car on a straight stretch of road where he could pass, so that he was still trailing the Audi when it slowed suddenly at the Common and pulled in and double-parked in front of the town hall.
    Jack braked the truck by dropping into lower gears, turned left off Route 29 and drew slowly, almost delicately, toward the Audi, just as the driver and the woman in the passenger’s seat got out. The woman, Lillian, wore a tailoredlavender ankle-length down coat with a hood; her narrow angular face seemed aimed out of the hood like a weapon at the door of the town hall, where a large number of people, adults and children, were coming out.
    The driver, Lillian’s husband, is named Bob Horner. He is a tall thin man with an extremely high forehead and strips of sandy hair that he combs carefully over the top of his head from a part just above his left ear. He wore that night a tan tweed shooting jacket, belted, with suede patches on the elbows and across the right shoulder and breast, and before he closed the car door, he reached inside and grabbed from the back a felt Tyrolean hat and put it on.
    By this time Jack had drawn his truck up next to the Audi, hood to hood and towering over it, and Wade swung open the door and stepped down to the ground. “Lillian!” he called, and she wheeled around to face him, while her husband, caught standing next to Wade, stepped quickly back and away.
    As if merely curious, Lillian asked, “Where’s Jill?” She smiled lightly.
    Lillian, as usual, was playing a role in a scene, Wade decided. And its purpose was to manipulate him into playing opposite her. Though he was not fooled by the tactic, it was effective nonetheless. It was an old story: she was too fast for him. At least when it came to setting up their respective roles—controlling what he said to her and how he said it. He always realized a few seconds too late that their encounters were contests, games with high stakes, and that winning them had nothing to do with rightness or wrongness or even with will power—God knows, he had plenty of will power, everyone said so, even Lillian herself. No, it had to do with who could set the rules of the game first, which, as he always found out a little too late, came straight from the nature of the roles they played. If she was yellow, he had to be red; if her die was six, his was forced to be one.
    He leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the trunk of the Audi, as if he were being frisked, and spread all ten fingers out and studied them for a second. “Me and Jill, we just had a little spat, Lillian,” he said. “That’s all. She felt kind of strange, I guess, and shy. From not knowing some of the kids or something. You know, from not knowing them like she used to, feeling like an outsider, I think. So she decided the best thing was to call you to come up here to bring her home. Ididn’t know she called you. I don’t know what she said, but I … I tried to call you, to get you to forget it, you know? But you’d already left.”
    â€œWell, where is she now?” she asked. “In there, in the truck with