Read Online Little Known Facts: A Novel by Christine Sneed - Free Book Online Page B

notice four pairs of running shoes lined up along the wall, all new. Billy ran track in high school, but he wasn’t one of the team’s stars. In college he didn’t play any sports, except intramural soccer and pickup basketball.
    His place is tidy, more or less, though it looks like the cleaning lady is due for a visit soon—from the light of a nearby lamp, I can see dust on the window ledges in the living room where I sit on one end of the sofa and Billy on the other. The sofa is brown leather and not particularly comfortable, but it looks stylish and expensive, which it is. All of his furniture is from a Danish design showroom, one where he worked for a few months as a salesperson before growing bored. Sofas aren’t my thing, he claimed. What is your thing? I wanted to know. I’ll tell you when I find it, was his response, his look both defiant and sad.
    “So Anna told you?” he says quietly.
    I study his face for a second or two. He really does look exhausted. He must not be sleeping very well. I could write him a prescription for Valium, two or three milligrams, nothing too serious, but I am not in the habit of offering my children or friends drugs, even if some of the latter have asked for them over the years. Los Angeles is a city filled with highly and creatively medicated people. Though I suppose most cities are. I suppose this is how city dwellers keep pace or set the pace or set the traps that catch the biggest monsters.
    I decide not to take his gloomy mood head-on. “Told me about—?”
    “Danielle. We broke up last weekend.”
    “She did mention it, and I was very sorry to hear this.”
    “Yeah, well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    He shakes his head. “Not many relationships work out. Why should this one?”
    “Billy, that’s not a good attitude.”
    “You should talk,” he says.
    I stare at him. “Why? Because your father and I got a divorce? We were together for fifteen years, remember.”
    “Barely.”
    “We were together until the divorce.”
    He turns his head away, and in this mulish slant, I can see Renn in him very clearly, his old attitude of surly silence, his conviction that he had been wronged, despite the fact that he was the one who was always going off somewhere interesting while I stayed home with our children and my patients and hospital protocols and myriad resentments. Renn was making so much money by the time both of our kids were out of diapers that some of my friends thought that I should have been able to live with his absences, because weren’t we set for life? I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to, right? Renn had paid off my med school loans by writing two separate checks, and what, realistically, did I have to complain about? What a gorgeous home we had, what healthy, pretty children, what nice clothes/cars/ crystal/linens/curtains/pool furniture. Not to mention, I had a movie-star husband. And after a few years, didn’t all married couples lose interest in each other sexually anyway? Just why was I in such a rotten mood all the time?
    “Okay. You were together,” he says, still not looking at me.
    “Let me take you to dinner,” I say, suddenly very tired and feeling as if I might start crying. An oppressive malaise hovers around us like smoke. It doesn’t help that almost no lights are on. His unhappiness makes me feel both lonely and worried for him. No mother, no matter her children’s ages, ever stops fearing that they will somehow come to harm.
    He shakes his head. “No thanks. I already ate.”
    It’s only six thirty, and I’m certain that he’s lying. “Come out with me anyway. There’s a Thai place a few blocks from here that I like.”
    He doesn’t reply.
    I hesitate, but then I say it. “Come on. Today’s a special occasion.”
    He regards me, only slightly interested. “What is it?”
    “Your father and I have now been divorced for as long as we were married,” I say. “It was