Read Online Slow Burn by G. M. Ford - Free Book Online

counter. Dude. The red light on the phone by the bed was
blinking. Two messages. Call Rebecca about when to meet at new house. Call
Karen at work.
    The new house
was actually the old house. My parents' house on the east side of Queen Ann
Hill. The trust allowed me either to live there rent-free or to lease it out
and keep the proceeds. I'd always opted for the latter, feeling that I somehow
didn't belong there without them. As if, even as a child, I had simply wandered
into the middle of a scene that began before my time and that surely would
outlive us all.
    Rebecca Duvall
and I had known each other since grammar school. If you discounted the three
years I'd been married, we'd been dating for nineteen years. Rebecca was the
only child of a shore-leave shimmy between her mom, Letha, and an alcoholic
merchant marine whose identity had been systematically reduced to the pronoun
"him."
    My earliest
memories of Duvall are of the tall girl with the blue barrettes who sat up
front in the third grade- and knew the answers to just about everything.
According to the oft-told legend, Letha had worked three finger-to-the-bone
jobs to get Rebecca through medical school. As if in penance, Rebecca had
pledged to see her mother through old age. We had an unspoken understanding
that whenever Letha turned in her lunch pail, we would sit down and decide what
to do next about our relationship. We counted on her dying, not on her wanting
a roommate.
    Letha's
stormy
relationship with her only sister, Rhetta, an equally ancient crone
from Lincoln City , Oregon, had mellowed significantly in recent years.
What had once consisted
of rninimal contact followed by months of heated recrimination had
weathered
into a cozy little menage of mutual deterrence. The old women now
wanted to
live out their days in sibling synergy. Time doth make cowards of us
all.
    All bets were
suddenly off. No matter that the Duvall digs up in Ravenna technically belonged
to Rebecca. No way Letha was moving to Bumfuck, Oregon. So that meant Rhetta
was coming to Seattle. Duvall's choices were thin. Live in the house with the
two of them and go shopping for orthopedic shoes, or make other arrangements.
It was simple enough. Rebecca kept paying the mortgage; the old ladies got the
house and it was time for me to putt or get off the green.
    Just
so
happened that the family manse was between tenants. When the Levines
moved to Tennessee, the trust took the opportunity to have the place
inspected. As might be expected
in a sixty-year-old house, which had been leased out for the better
part of
twenty-five years, major renovations were needed. They'd sent me the
standard
courtesy letter detailing what they proposed to do, which was damn near
everything, and what it was going to cost me, which was about a hundred
eighty
thousand bucks. And that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that I'd
made
the mistake of complaining about it to Duvall.
    All attempts to
convince her that it might be best to start this new phase of our relationship
on neutral ground had been met with deaf ears. For reasons I'll never
understand, the lure of a rent-free, completely renovated, twelve-room house
overlooking Lake Union was more than Rebecca could withstand. We were moving in
this weekend.
    She answered on
the first ring. I could tell from the static that she was in her car.
"Yes," she said.
    "You get
my other message?"
    "You're
sleeping at the hotel?"
    "My place
is all packed up. Ifs a godsend."
    A short but
meaningful silence ensued. Then she said, "I'm going to run some errands
before we go up to the house."
    The work crews
were finished. The house was supposedly ready to go. We had agreed to take a
look at it together, this afternoon.
    "I'm gonna
be late."
    "Leo,"
she said, "you're not cheesing out on me, are you? I mean, I don't want to
feel like—"
    I cut her off.
"I'm doing exactly what I want to do, with exactly who I want to do it
with. Period. That's it."
    "Okay,"
she said, without much