Read Online Condominium by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

you.”
    “The children are using the elevators.”
    “Is that supposed to be humorous? You know it was nine months for Judy over a week ago.”
    “And you know she had the first two with about as much trouble as your average brown rabbit, and if there was any trouble, Hal could certainly phone.”
    “Maybe he phoned when we were marketing.”
    “If so, he’ll try again.”
    She came out of the kitchen, marched past him and went out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her. He went into the utility room and got his fish box and spinning rod. By the time he had taken the old reel off and put the new one on and threaded the line through the guides, she was back. In her anger she had forgotten to take a key. The door locked automatically. He decided not to answer the first knock. After the second knocking he waited just long enough so that when he opened the door, she stood there with her fist upraised to start again.
    “Couldn’t you hear me?”
    “Hear you what? You knocked and I came to the door and opened it.”
    “I knocked twice.”
    “Then evidently I did not hear the first knocking, or I would have opened the door.”
    He went and sat on the couch. She slung the mail at him from ten feet away. The corner of a small catalog stung the corner of his mouth and the rest of the mail fluttered down around him, on the couch and on the rug.
    “There is all your terribly important mail,” she said. “It ought to keep you busy the rest of the day.”
    He gathered it up. Ads, circulars, solicitations. “I’ll try to make it last. We retireds have to spread things out.”
    “Hah! Retired!”
    “Didn’t you know?”
    “
You
may be.
I’m
not. What the hell has changed for me? Cooking, cleaning, shopping, dusting, laundry, bed-making. Not only you don’t have a job, you don’t even have a yard to take care of anymore. Retirement is one hell of a laugh.”
    He faked astonishment as he looked up at her. “My God! I neverrealized you’re working your fingers to the bone stacking dishes in the dishwasher and putting the washing in the washing machine. Wow! Here you are waiting on me hand and foot and—”
    “You can be one ice-cold sarcastic son of a bitch. You are—”
    “Exactly like my mother?” He jumped up from the couch. “I knew it was about time for that.”
    “She was a cold person, George. Through and through. And she had that terrible sense of … superiority, of being a little bit better than everyone around her, without any cause in the world that I could ever discover. You are exactly like she was.”
    “You know what you have? You have a compulsion to feel abused. Any idiot could run this apartment with one hand during the television commercials. But that would take away the kicks. You have to dawdle and futz around and fool around until you make every ten-minute job take an hour. Then you can blame me for keeping you in harness.”
    He saw the familiar tears well into her green eyes and spill and run. “That is
stinking!
That is a cruel stinking thing to say. I’ve worked hard and I’ve sacrificed having a life of my own just to—”
    “Come here to this garden spot where you can swim in the pool and walk on the beach and enjoy the sunshine.”
    “As if you earned it all for me? Just for me?
Bull
shit, George. If we had to retire on your very own pension, we damned well wouldn’t be retired yet, would we? And if we did hang around and retire on it, we wouldn’t be living here. We live here because they put an interstate past the farm.”
    “You would have sold it years ago.”
    “And you hung onto it because you’re so shrewd? Ha! It is to laugh, George Genius Gobbin. We did without a lot of things while the kids were growing up so you could hang onto that farmand go out there and pretend to be the big man bossing those thieving tenants around. You kept it for sentimental reasons, and if Hap hadn’t gotten after you to sell, we’d still be up there, if they hadn’t