Read Online Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie - Free Book Online Page A

It was time to move. Maybe that’s what she’d do, she’d move and not tell Brent. But then somebody else would. This was Frog Point. You couldn’t get away with anything in Frog Point.
    Maddie eased herself down onto the bed. It was heaven to close her eyes. It meant her eyeballs weren’t going to fall out. But the rest of the pain, the pain everywhere else, pressed down on her so that she sank into the mattress to get away from it. The thing is, she thought, I hate him. So it shouldn’t matter whether he’s cheating or not. But I hurt all over, and I hate the thought of facing this damn town with all this mess to handle, and I can’t stand what this is going to do to Em. So I think I’ll think about this later.
    I’ll have to think about it later.

    At seven that evening, C.L. leaned against the back door of his uncle’s farmhouse and listened to the crickets tuning up. They had about an hour to go before dark, but a few of them started early, and their creak blended with the faint wash of the river that ran past the farm a couple of hundred yards away, and with the birds making the most of the last of the hot August day. It was the kind of evening that made a man want to crawl into a hammock with a cold beer and a warm woman, but the woman he was trying not to think about was married and had slammed a door in his face. So much for hammock fantasies. It was probably impossible to make love in a hammock anyway, although if Maddie had been the one in the hammock, he would sure as hell have been willing to try. This thought led to others, none of which he should have been thinking and all of which made him jump a foot in guilt when his aunt spoke behind him.
    “Did you wash your hands, C.L.?”
    C.L. jerked around to see Anna loading the kitchen table with dinner, covering the red and white checked oilcloth with thick white china plates and bowls full of steaming ham and potatoes and God knew what else. The smell registered on him, and his mouth watered at the thought of the salt and juice in the local-cured ham and the cream and the cheese that the potatoes bubbled in.
    “I have died and gone to heaven,” he told her, and she said, “Not unless you’ve washed your hands, you haven’t.”
    Her voice was tart, but she looked just as warm and sure as she had when Henry’d brought him home to her twenty-seven years ago. His mother had told him for the last time how worthless he was and that this time she was going to send him to a home for delinquents because that’s what he was, and he’d run off to sleep in the park, acting as if that was what all ten-year-olds did. Then Henry had pulled up beside him just as he was heading for the picnic house, and said, “Get in, kid.” C.L. had wanted to say no, that he could take care of himself, but even back then, you didn’t argue with Henry. So he’d climbed in the car, and Henry had taken him out to Anna, who’d said, “You’ll stay with us, C.L.,” and then he had said, “No. I can take care of myself,” because he knew what happened when people did you favors: they made you pay forever. His mother was still making him pay for giving birth to him. He didn’t want any more of that.
    But then Anna had said, “Why, we know that, C.L., but who’s going to take care of us? We’re getting on, you know. We could use somebody young and strong around the house.” C.L. grinned now at the memory. Henry must have been in his forties about then, strong enough to bench-press a cow. And Anna had never had a feeble day in her life. But it had made sense to a ten-year-old who wanted to be needed, and taking care of them didn’t seem to have any strings attached to it, in fact they’d owe him, so he’d said, “Well, all right, as long as you know I’m just doin‘ it for you.” And Anna had taken him upstairs to a big bed with soft white sheets and told him he’d have pancakes for breakfast.
    It had taken him twenty years to figure out that the obligations you