Read Online Savage Love by Douglas Glover - Free Book Online

soundly.
    â€œHoney,” I said, “we have a situation here with Sophie that takes priority.” Her eyes began to swim.
    I went into the kitchen to pour myself another drink. I thought about Lily, whom I had met at the public library during Sophie’s violin lesson. I generally dropped Sophie at her violin teacher’s apartment after school those days and waited at the library, leafing through magazines and a book on how things work I had found in the Juvenile Non-Fiction section. It made me feel good to look at the pictures and captions and begin to understand something of MP3 players, tablet computers and liquid fuel rockets. One of the problems with life these days is the way technology has gotten away from us. Everything is a black box with an on/off switch. We can’t fix a thing once it’ s broken any more. It really helped to see pictures of the insides of ordinary household items, to see their mysterious inner workings.
    I trusted Sophie to walk the three blocks from her violin teacher’s place, but one day she walked in with this strange girl — swarthy complexion, thick, dark eyebrows, nervous eyes, intelligence written all over her, along with adventurousness and low self-esteem. Sophie led her to me, and we started to talk while my daughter played math challenges on the computer. We had a lot in common: we both liked to talk about ourselves and we were both polite listeners. She started meeting me when I walked the dog at night. One thing led to another. She said she loved me. I didn’t believe her and I didn’ t think she believed herself. We were both playing a little game. I said I loved her. Then I would come home and tell my girls I loved them and kiss Ellen good night and tell her I loved her. I was full of love.
    Straggling through the garage door to the Subaru, we somehow let the dog out. This was bad. She was a German shepherd, frightened people. Also, when she got away she’d run down Pulver to number 81 , where there was a chow permanently chained in the breezeway. I didn’t know what my dog and the chow had in common, but that was where my dog went. When she finally came home, she generally vomited once or twice on the carpets. I didn’t know what she ate at the chow’s house. Sometimes I wondered if the chow’s owners were trying to poison my dog. I kept thinking I’d go over there one night and find out what my dog’s secret life really consisted of. Isobel had the hamster cage. Katie was sniffling, somewhat catatonic with emotional overload and sleep deprivation (it was ten minutes past her bedtime). Sophie’s bleeding was beginning to ebb; possibly she ’d lost all the blood there was to lose. The dog made me unreasonably angry. I thought, I’ll kill the dog.
    I seatbelted the girls and nestled my drink in the cup tray between the seats, blasted out of the garage like a Saturn rocket and swung onto the street. The house was ablaze with lights. There was a steady tick in the engine, the sound of machine deterioration, the approach of entropy. I couldn’t afford to fix it. When I complained, Ellen said I didn’t have a right. I had quit my steady job with the big stable company to chip in with a friend who owned a software start-up. He’d invented a surefire cellphone app that was going to make us rich. I spent four days a week in the air, flying home on weekends, flying high, Ellen said. We built the house. I bought the Saab, a lap pool, widescreen TV s, every gadget going. Ellen became a soccer mom (studying to be a Jungian therapist). Now the house was under water, I had my CV posted on the Internet, and I had plenty of spare time. I couldn’t get over any of this. You think you know how things work, that you have some control, then you realize you’re on a ride — you can’t see the road and you’re not sure there’s a driver. The kind of world we’re in makes us all gamblers and