Read Online On Off by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online

kitchen, Mikey straddling her hip, Esther clinging to her skirt, and looked at him in mingled scorn and exasperation. “Christ almighty, Walt, it can’t be the hunting season yet!” she snapped.
    “Just around the corner. I’m going up to the cabin this weekend to get it ready — and that means I need my jacket — and I can’t find it because it isn’t where it ought to be.”
    “Nor are you.” She put Mikey in his highchair and Esther on a chair with a fat cushion, then hollered for Stanley and Bella. “Dinner’s ready!”
    A boy and a girl galloped into the room, whooping that they were starving. Mom was a great cook who never made them eat things they didn’t like — no spinach, no carrots, no cabbage unless she’d made it into coleslaw.
    Walter sat at one end of the long table, Paola at its other end where she could spoon slop into Mikey’s mouth, open like a bird’s, and correct Esther’s table manners, still far from perfect. “The other thing I can’t stand,” she said as soon as everyone was eating, “is your selfishness. It would be great to have somewhere to take the kids on a weekend, but no! It’s your cabin, and we can whistle — Stanley, that is not permission to whistle!”
    “You’re right when you say the cabin is mine,” he said coldly, cutting his very good lasagna with a fork. “My grandfather left me the cabin, Paola — to me, and me alone. It’s the one place where I can get away from all this mayhem!”
    “Your wife and four children, you mean.”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “If you didn’t want four children, Walt, why didn’t you tie a knot in the goddamn thing? It takes two to tango.”
    “Tango? What’s that?” asked Stanley.
    “A sexy dance,” said his mother curtly.
    An answer that for some reason inexplicable to Stanley caused Dad to roar with laughter.
    “Shut up!” Paola growled. “Shut up, Walt!”
    He wiped his eyes, put another piece of lasagna on Stanley’s empty plate and then replenished his own plate. “I am going up to the cabin on Friday night, Paola, and I won’t be home until dawn on Monday. I have a mountain of reading to do, and as God is my witness, I cannot read in this house!”
    “If you’d only give up this stupid research and go into a good private practice, Walt, we could live in a house big enough for twelve kids without destroying your peace!” Her big brown eyes sparkled with angry tears. “You’ve gotten this fantastic reputation for dealing with all those weird and wonderful diseases that have people’s names — Wilson, Huntington, don’t ask me to remember all of them! — and I know you get offers to go into private practice in much better places than Holloman — Atlanta, Miami, Houston — warm places. Places where house help is cheap. The children could have music lessons, I could go back to college —”
    His hand came down on the table violently; the children went still, shivered. “Just how do you know I’ve had offers, Paola?” he asked dangerously.
    Her face paled, but she defied him. “You leave the letters lying around, I find them everywhere.”
    “And read them. Yet you wonder why I have to get away? My mail is private, do you hear me? Private!”
    Walt threw his fork down, shoved his chair away from the table and stalked from the kitchen. His wife and children stared after him, then Paola wiped Mikey’s slimed face and rose to get the ice cream and Jell-O.
    There was an old mirror on the wall to one side of the fridge; Paola caught a glimpse of herself in it and felt the tears overflow. Eight years had been enough to turn the vivacious and very pretty young woman with the great body into a thin, downright plain woman who looked years older than she was.
    Oh, the joy of meeting Walt, of captivating Walt, of catching Walt! A fully qualified medical doctor who was so brilliant that they would soon be rich. What she hadn’t counted on was that Walt had no intention of leaving academic medicine — plumbers