Read Online Fatal Flaw by William Lashner - Free Book Online

concentrated more on her studies than on her social life. To her great surprise she discovered that she was good at academics. Dean’s-list good. Good enough for the church scholarship to be extended to graduate school if she wanted to attend, and she did. She never forgot what had happened to her father and family, never forgot how an unfair contract and unsafe conditions had left her family on the brink. It was that experience, she told me, that had sent her into the law, and when she said it, there was none of the ironic tone that normally left you looking for the explanatory footnotes. A law school in New Jersey gave her enough aid so that with the scholarship and loans she could make a go of it. Three years later she landed an associate’s position with a small but profitable plaintiff’s firm in Philadelphia. Four years after that, when an affair with the managing partner created a scandal, she took a stack of files and went out on her own.
    “It all sounds so damn inspiring,” I say. “Rags to riches.”
    “Yes, I’m the American dream.”
    “How did you meet Guy?”
    “At a seminar on proving and defending the medical malpractice case.”
    “I always knew CLE had to be good for something.”
    “That’s what I get for trying to improve my mind.”
    “You think you deserve better?”
    “I think I’m getting exactly what I deserve. Another martini, please.”
    “When do you have to get home?”
    “After this drink.”
    “Then make it a double.”
     
    I SENSE in her the grand design of some awesome inevitability. I don’t know from where it emanates, maybe it comes from having your father crushed beneath a load of pine, but its symptom is a weary resignation.
    “Why don’t you just end it?” I ask.
    “But I like seeing you.”
    “I mean with Guy.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”
    “Because you love him?”
    “Why else?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “See. It’s so simple, isn’t it?”
    She is committed to Guy, absolutely, she tells me so all the time, there is no other option. But still, when I call, she picks a place.
    “I am so tired,” she says. “Do you ever get so tired?”
    “No,” I say. “I’m too frightened all the time to be tired.”
    “Frightened of what?”
    “Of learning that the best is behind me.”
    “Sometimes I have this urge to just start over,” she says. “Be something new.”
    “Don’t talk about it, do it. Guy has, apparently. You can, too.”
    “But I already have. This is it.”
    “You thought you’d change your life with Guy?”
    “No, Guy was something else.”
    “And what am I?”
    “You are an indulgence. Something not good for me, like a cigarette or a drink.”
    “Hazardous to your health.”
    “If only you knew.”
     
    WHAT SHE sees in me, I can only guess. What I see in her, besides the obvious beauty, is a sadness, palpable but elusive, a sadness that reaches into my heart like a claw.
    I’m not struggling to understand why her sadness touches me as it does, why I feel about her what I feel; it doesn’t take Jung to dredge up the suspects. My mother drinking gin late nights in the kitchen, drumming her fingers on the Formica, wondering how she ended up married to this man, living in this tattered house in this decaying suburb, shackled to this brat with his whine like a siren. Or my father, in his chair in front of the television with a can of Iron City in his hand, sitting in the chair in the dark after his wife left him alone with his son, on his face the dazed expression of a car-crash victim staggering out of his wrecked vehicle. Why is it that children of alcoholics find themselves mysteriously attracted to the alcoholic personality? Answer that and you might understand why I found myself, many years before, engaged to a sad, sweet girl named Janice, who fulfilled all my greatest fears by breaking the engagement and running off with a forty-seven-year-old urologist named Wren. Or why, a few years after that, I prostrated my