Read Online All Saints by K.D. Miller - Free Book Online

her desk by the time he was ready to leave. He pointed at her, raised an eyebrow and said, “Write me a Pulitzer.”
    â€œBut I’m still glad we ran into each other,” Cass was going on. “Because you just kind of disappeared. And I always wanted to talk to you. Tell you how sorry I was. About—That I didn’t do anything for you, I mean. That day.”
    â€œThere’s nothing you could have done.” Emily did not want to discuss this. Anybody else would have picked up on that. But not Cass.
    â€œIt was just so weird. Like, I thought I knew Liz. I never thought she’d—And I never knew Dave was—If I had, I’d have told you. Promise. But all of a sudden Liz just barges in the door and pushes past me and goes charging down the basement stairs and then I hear yelling and what sounds like a fight and I just stand there thinking, What do I do? Do I go down there and try to break it up? Rick had just stepped out, or else he could have—”
    â€œHow is Rick?” Emily couldn’t believe she was asking. But she had to change the subject.
    â€œRick?” Cass blew through her lips. “I don’t even know where Rick is, and I don’t care. You know what happened? A week after you two left? Marples came back from the dead.”
    â€œMarples? Garth Marples?” The man Emily had never seen, but whose smell she could conjure up in an instant, having spent an hour with her face buried in his pillow.
    â€œThe one and only. Fresh from the morgue. With his hospital bracelet still on his wrist. Hollering at us, calling us Goddamned hippies and giving us half an hour to get out of his house before he called the cops. First thing in the morning. I’m in my nightie. And in thirty minutes I’m going to be out on the street with no place to go. Hell of a way to start the day.”
    â€œBut Rick said—”
    â€œRick was full of shit. As usual. This was another one of his dumb-assed schemes. He wasn’t supposed to live in that house. And he sure as hell wasn’t supposed to let his friends move in. All he was supposed to do was keep an eye on the place and cut the grass. And he couldn’t even do that.”
    Emily nodded, remembering the field of weeds in front of the runt house. “So what happened?”
    â€œWhat happened to me was, I got taken in by the two friends I’m starting the business with. And I have to tell you. Getting thrown out of that house was my click. You know about click, don’t you? When you’re picking up some guy’s dirty socks and something goes click in your brain and you think, Hey. I’m just as smart as he is. And I work just as hard as he does. So how come I’m picking up his dirty socks? Well, that’s what happened to me when Marples came back and threw us out and it turned out that Rick had been lying to me. Again.”
    â€œSo you just walked away from Rick?”
    It was so strange to be saying that name. Asking about him. Rick was a taboo subject between her and Dave. She herself had declared it taboo, that day in the runt house when she listed her conditions. Some of them were easy, like him calling her Emily instead of Em or Mama or Babe. Others were harder, like him having nothing to do with Rick, ever again.
    All this time, whenever she had allowed herself to think about Rick, she had pictured him still living in the runt house with Cass. Which would have made Garth Marples either dead or in the hospital, dying. Now that picture had just been ripped into a million tiny pieces. Like the photograph the old soldier rips up. In those fragments of—what? A poem? A play? Fragments she wrote down just after she and Dave moved out of the runt house. They never grew into anything, those strange scribbled bits. But she kept them.
    â€œNo,” Cass was saying. “I didn’t just walk away from Rick.” She looked down at her tea. “He walked away from