Read Online Eleven Twenty-Three by Jason Hornsby - Free Book Online

be totally
okay with it if we—”
    “Oh Christ, Layne, are you retarded? I mean,
seriously. Are you retarded? Listen very carefully to me: I
am married . Do you understand? I. Am. Married. What we did
was a mistake. You have Tara. I have Mark, who I adore and would
die over if he ever did to me what I did to him. Got it? It was all
a drunken mistake, Layne. That’s what it was. Stop making an epic
romance novels out of scribbles on a bar napkin.”
    “ Mistakes , Mitsuko. There’s a plural
in there. We met up two more times after that first night at the
beach and the bar. So tell me another one.”
    “Am I really having this conversation? Am I
now arguing with you over how many times I got depressed and fucked
you? Layne, it was over six months ago that it happened. It was
before I married Mark and he and I had just had a big fight, and I
felt bad about your job and everything, so it was just a—”
    “A what , Mitsuko? A pity fuck? A
well-moved chess piece? What?”
    “Look, it was just one of those rare things
that happens and then never repeats itself. It’s over with. So why
don’t we just appreciate the time we did have and leave it
at that? Okay?”
    “I was just hoping that maybe we could go out
sometime soon and talk about it. Maybe we could go back to the
beach. Is that so out of the question?”
    “Yes, Layne, it is out of the
question. It is absolutely out of the question. What you’re
asking me to do is endanger my marriage so that I can sit next to
you on some wet sand and deflect all of your clumsy attempts to get
my pants off again. Sorry if I am not that interested.”
    “Mitsuko, you’re being a bitch .”
    “And you’re being hung up on. Our beach is
officially closed , Layne. Goodbye.”
    “No, Mitsuko, I’m sorry, wait, I just called
to tell you how you really did save my life that night, and I
just— fuck! ”
     

07:18:54 PM
     
    For the past seven years, my mother has lived
in an upstairs two-bedroom crypt situated in an apartment complex
named after a tiny gorgeous shell but intended for grotesque and
swollen old people. She moved there not long after our father left
and the house was sold. I never did meet the people who moved into
our old home on the other side of town, but according to my mother,
they were unsavory specters.
    My mother did not take to Dad’s frantic
escape very well. I quickly grew accustomed to it, as if I had
never had a father to begin with. We all but stopped talking after
the divorce, and I usually only received updates on his new life
out in Portland on Thanksgiving, Christmas, my birthday in March,
and a week or so after his own birthday in June. And this was only
because he called me repeatedly or was visiting his parents in New
Smyrna and would swing by Lilly’s End on his way to the airport. He
insisted each time that he had not forgotten about his son down in
Florida. I got risqué greeting cards with gift certificates to
Barnes & Noble or Macy’s on holidays, and sent the same
unsigned Hallmark card and twenty-five dollar vouchers for Outback
or Chili’s on the same occasions. This was, except for the few days
that led up to my departure, the extent to which my father and I
communicated. It never seemed to matter much. Not after Cindy,
who’s only three years older than I am and slightly more attractive
but much dumber than Tara, was married to him four months after the
divorce from Mom was final. That was just under eight years
ago.
    But for my mother, the experience was
permanently devastating. It drained everything from her: the
non-cat-related positive words from her vocabulary, twenty pounds,
the house I grew up in, her laid-back sense of calm, her tenure at
the college, her self-assurance, the wine shelves, her once
staggering physical beauty, and her will to find anything but
impending disaster and furtive glances in the world around her.
    It was a domino effect: younger women
appeared, the kind who enjoyed the company of a suited man