Read Online Last Ragged Breath by Julia Keller - Free Book Online

of security—did you ask her about Albright? You’ve been concerned about that, I know.”
    â€œNope. Never had the chance. She was in a hurry.” He scratched an ear. “Maybe I’m worrying about nothing. Not everybody keeps good records. I can get a little sloppy myself. And Walter’s an old man. Probably just got tired. All those years with the state police and then a security job. Law enforcement’s no picnic. Takes a toll.” Walter Albright’s incident reports for the months before his firing were spotty, irregular, with few specifics. It was almost as if he thought he could make the negatives go away by ignoring them. Nick heard that he’d built himself a palace of a house with some money his wife had inherited and settled down into a comfortable retirement. Should’ve done it sooner.
    Mary Sue picked up her bowl. She started to rise, intending to clear the table. Nick waved her back down in her seat.
    â€œWe’ll clean up in a bit,” he said. He was restless tonight, just as he’d often been after dinner back when he was sheriff and they waited for the next lightning-strike of bad news.
    His simple request to delay the cleanup had thrown her, knocking her off her rhythm, but she didn’t want him to know that. And so she shrugged— whatever —and put her bowl back in the precise spot where it had been. She would try. She always tried.
    But she was rattled now. Her plan for the next few minutes had been to collect the plates and bowls and silverware and stack them all in the dishwasher, then to check the contents of the refrigerator and the cupboards and make the penciled list for Lymon’s Market. Sunday was food-shopping day. Mary Sue planned her time minute by minute; it was the price she paid for being able to function, for keeping her mood pitched to a livable level.
    â€œGuess I thought Belfa would understand why I had to make the change,” he said. “You remember how it used to be. I mean, did we ever make it through a whole danged meal—not to mention a week’s vacation—without being interrupted by a phone call? Or a dozen phone calls? Always another crisis.” Nick didn’t like making speeches but he made one now anyway, revving himself up, because he needed to make sure she understood: It wasn’t you . He never wanted Mary Sue to think she was the reason he’d given up the sheriff’s job. Yes, her illness was part of it—he’d taken a leave of absence the year before, they’d gone to Chicago to see a specialist there, she’d tried a new antipsychotic medication—but only a part. The biggest reason? He was tired to the bone. And sick of other people’s problems. That was it. Really.
    â€œYou remember,” he said. “Know you do. If it wasn’t a traffic accident, it’d be a drowning. Or a drug overdose. Or a fistfight. A fire. Or somebody’s car getting stolen. Or their cat. Or their lawnmower. Or just somebody bellyaching about something. I got so goddamned sick of it, Mary Sue, all the time, year after year. I know you know that, but sometimes I don’t think anybody can really know just how deep it ran in me. I was getting to be a cranky old fart. All I saw was people at their very worst. I was starting to—”
    Abruptly, he stopped talking. She had come around to his side of the table. Instead of getting up, he wrapped his arms around her waist and turned his face into her apron. She stroked the back of his head. He could smell her hands, and the pungent scent of the onions she’d chopped to put in the chili, and he knew that his head was greasy with sweat, after his long workday. But it didn’t matter. She was trying to soothe him, console him, just as he had often consoled her, and those other things—smells and sweat, the body’s small persistent betrayals—were irrelevant. Over the years they’d gone back and forth