Read Online Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon - Free Book Online

town, with his wife and children living not so far away, and him involved in all these domestic things. I wouldn’t be able to call him if I wanted. We’d have to sneak around, quickies on abandoned roads, that sort of thing. I’m sure that’s just the kind of adventure he’d love. But me? I’d end up like what’s-her-name. Your brother’s wife. Rhonda. Wandering around St. Bonaventure like a spook.”
    â€œDon’t do it,” my wife said. “You deserve better. You really do.”
    â€œYeah,” Joan said. “I know I do.” She cut her steak carefully, glancing down to where Joshua was driving a toy truck against her foot. She made a face. “So what’s with the whole Rhonda thing, anyway? Anything new?”
    â€œNot that I know of,” Susan said. She looked over at me, and it sent a sudden prickle across the back of my neck. “It’s still in progress, as far as I know,” she said. She shot me another quick look, one that was meant to convey sympathy for Joan.
    â€œPoor Joan,” Susan would say later, when we were up with the baby in the middle of the night. “I wish there was something we could do for her.” She went on to remark how sweet and smart and good-looking Joan was. “Why doesn’t someone wonderful come along for her?” she asked.
    And I murmured, “I don’t know.” But the truth was, I thought, even if a wonderful man came along, he wouldn’t be good enough. At least Rhonda had made a choice. Joan acted like she could go through life, making excuses but never doing anything, as if there were an infinity of possibilities to choose from. Sooner or later she was going to find those possibilities were disappearing, one by one. But I wouldn’t tell Susan this, because generalities annoyed her. “What possibilities?” she’d ask. “Disappeared how?” And I wouldn’t be able to explain.
    Saturdays are my only day off, and in the morning I was back to work at the motel. I tried to put all the thoughts of the previous day—of Rhonda, and my sister, and disappearing possibilities—out of my mind. To a certain extent, I guess I was feeling a little guilty. I kept imagining that she had recognized me, and I pictured her eventually getting back together with Kent, telling him. I tried to think of what I would say to Susan. I knew how she would interpret it: I secretly had the hots for Rhonda, she’d say. I was getting restless. That’s what she would think, no matter how carefully I explained myself.
    Susan honestly hated Rhonda. “She’s beneath contempt,” she’d always say. “How could a mother leave her child like that, for any reason?” In a way, I suppose, I was surprised at the hard edge in her voice, just as I was surprised at how easily she’d settled into being a mother. She had once been pretty wild herself, and I thought she’d have more sympathy.
    When we first met, Susan had seemed so dangerous to me: she hung around with older men, who gave her rides on their motorcycles and jacked-up cars, and she was a drinker. I guess it was what I needed at the time. My mother had just died, and my father had just had the first in the series of strokes that would eventually kill him. He once told me that the best thing he’d ever done was to be there for his parents when they were old—his brothers were never around—and that stuck with me. I’d come home from college to help with the motel, and Susan would come over late and talk me into turning on the NO VACANCY light before we’d filled. She’d get me to do things I would never have done without her. I still thought fondly of how we’d stayed up all night, how she and her tough girlfriends taught me how to bounce a quarter into a glass of beer, and of the time she’d tricked me into trying marijuana by feeding it to me in a cake. We used to