Read Online Necessity by Brian Garfield - Free Book Online Page B

phone—”
    â€œI don’t use his name any more. I want to build up a credit rating on my own.”
    â€œYou know, I can sympathize with that. Honestly.
    These laws and red tape just step all over a woman, especially that’s, like, gone through a divorce or maybe she’s been widowed or, you know.”
    The telephone woman gives her a smile that is startling for its openness. “But I just don’t think you can get around it. I’m real, real sorry, Jennifer. I know exactly what you mean. Like, you’re not trying to buy the whole telephone company—you just want a phone, right? Honestly I wish I could, you know, do something about it. These deposits are just ridic’lous, Jennifer, I know what you mean. But I guess the company just gets ripped off so many times they just got to have these big, you know, deposits.”
    She writes out a check for a whopping payment, still startled by the way the sales clerk keeps calling her Jennifer. She supposes she’ll have to get used to the creepy ersatz intimacy with which these Californians instantly take to calling total strangers by their first names.
    She thinks, At least it’s getting me used to being called, you know, like, Jennifer.
    It reminds her how Bert always insisted on calling her Madeleine. Never a nickname, never the diminutive Matty. Madeleine in full—and he treated you as if you were a fragile porcelain art work.
    It’s so easy now to recognize all the clues he left strewn about—how is it possible to have been so unaware for so long?
    Something to do with what you’re looking for, she supposes; something to do with what you want from the world.
    When she married Bert that was the life she thought she wanted. Fast lane: the designer milieu, the tony friends, the money. Put it crudely then: Bert was on a power trip and you were callow enough to enjoy the ride.
    It would have taken a saintly kind of wisdom to turn it down.
    Face it, Matty-Madeleine-Jennifer, you were a young woman adrift and the shore was receding at a steady rate: you were happy to tie yourself to the towline that Bert offered.
    For sure you weren’t going anyplace else important at the time.
    You started with plenty of advantages, didn’t you. A beautiful child with a brain. Parents loving and just—but of the old school. Sometimes painfully embarrassing: remember when you were fourteen and Dad was assigned to cadre at Fort Ord. He’d taken you and Mom down to the Monterey beach that Sunday morning and you’d had lunch in Carmel and cruised some of the art galleries. You were in the eighth grade having trouble with plane geometry and still getting used to wearing a bra and interested in horses more than boys. On the way home that afternoon Dad was telling you about Appaloosa horses and how the Nez Perce Indians in Idaho had developed the breed—he knew a great deal about native Americans and he was convinced there was Indian blood in the family, somewhere vaguely back four or five generations.
    Caught up in his Appaloosa discourse he didn’t spot the Highway Patrol cruiser in time.
    He made a face and pulled over. She heard the dying cry of the siren. The trooper walked forward with a hand on his holster and stooped to peer into the car. Dad kept both hands on the wheel. When the trooper saw the major’s pips on the shoulders of Dad’s uniform he drew back deferentially and began to put his citation book away but Dad glared sternly at him and said too loudly, “Absolutely right, officer. I had my mind on something else and I was going over the limit. You’ve got me fair and square. Go ahead and write out the ticket. It’ll remind me to keep my eye on the speedometer.”
    Painfully obvious that all this was for your benefit. An act to impress you with the importance of honest confession and respect for the law. It was almost comical. Later you and Mom had a laugh over it.
    But his