Read Online Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady - Free Book Online

requires adding all these sums. When she sits at her desk to arrange the numbers in a column to solve her own problem, we are both astonished to discover we own over twelve hundred books. I grew up in an apartment where there were no books, and I’m a materialist about them now, rarely use the library because I want to own what I covet. I stuff my children with these goodies, so essential to the sweet universe in which I want them to grow.With my books, with Bach and Coltrane and Haydn, with the music and theater that Jay loves, I’ve accumulated enough wealth to insure me against the shabby rooms of my childhood, become a giddy nouveau riche of culture. So much so that when we have my mother to dinner she is puzzled, merely querulous in her poking:
Your hair’s so black, do you dye it? That boy eats too much. Hannah’s a fresh one, she is.
I feel as if I’ve put one over on her, Hansel putting a knuckle through the bars of the cage for the witch to pinch, hiding from her how fat I’ve grown on plenty.
    Nathan pokes his head in the door to annoy his sister. I get up, slip the scarf from my neck, and lash it through the air like a lion tamer’s whip, backing him into his room again. At the sound of his laughter, Hannah jumps up from her desk to join us, and the three of us are tangled on the floor when Jay comes home from work.
    Jay gets down on his hands and knees with us, butting Hannah with his head and lowing like a cow, sneaking a feel on me in the tangle of bodies, kissing me in a showy way that the children pretend to be embarrassed by but that they really enjoy. Walter’s wrong. Happiness is the simplest, most literal thing, as carelessly sprawled around me as the warm bodies of my three loves.
    Walter is jumpier than usual, maybe because at the meeting tonight he confessed to backsliding, having a beer at a bar on his way home from work yesterday. We’ve gotten into the habit now of having two or three cigarettes together when I’m parked in front of his apartment building, and Walter can’t sit still even when he’s sitting still. He snaps the cover of his matchbook open and shut over and over, knocks his hand against the window while he talks, smears a spilled cake of ash into his clothing, tugs an oily strand of hair loose from his ponytail, raps a knuckle against the dashboard and scatters more flakes of ash there.
    He asks me to come up to his apartment, just for a minute. “Just till I make sure the bogeyman isn’t lying in wait.”
    I know better. I know he’s come up with that bogeyman in order to trigger a maternal yes. Still I agree to come up.
    His apartment is no surprise: an L-shaped studio with a garage-sale Formica table and two chairs next to the compact, filthy kitchen counter, a worn sofa covered with an ugly afghan. I could even say I feel at home with the bare floor, the bare walls, the big TV —a big blank eye, the only new thing. Clothes are scattered everywhere, and cups and plates. Beside the TV is a pyramid of crumpled, empty potato-chip bags. To make room for us to sit, he shovels things from the sofa—a blanket and pillow, a Game Boy, and a plate of stale crackers.
    If I sit down, I’ll have to stay. “Is that your kid’s Game Boy?”
    He nods. “I’m supposed to get my kid every other weekend. But he doesn’t want to come anymore. Guess he doesn’t like sleeping on the pullout sofa. My ex-wife won’t help me out with him, either.”
    â€œIs that why—”
    â€œThere’s always a reason,” Walter says.
    â€œYou’d think she’d want him to have a relationship with his father.”
    Walter laughs. “Well,
you
might.”
    He lights another cigarette, and when he cups his hands around the match, the glow reflected on his face shivers like his shaking hands.
    â€œI didn’t always stick to wine,” I say. “Sometimes I’d drink