Read Online The Better to Hold You by Alisa Sheckley - Free Book Online

red roses one year to celebrate our first year of shared rent, a pair of silk pan ties the morning after he’d first seen me drunk.
    But birthdays, even pivotal, painful ones, Hunter tended to forget. If you don’t need to buy a gift, you don’t mark it on your calendar—as simple as that. I suppose, if I’d asked him out to the movies, he would have taken me. But it just seemed a bit pathetic, somehow, like calling in a special favor. Far better to just let things slide by.
    I thought I had come to terms with the absence of any special anniversarial treatment—or, as Hunter would call it, any false emotion. So maybe it was just my imagination that he seemed particularly dour that morning. He was preoccupied as he stood by the fussily percolating coffeepot and short-tempered when I asked him if he wanted toast, so I didn’t bother to suggest an afternoon movie. Clearly, he was intending to spend this day as he had all the others since his return: searching the Internet for obscure books and articles on wolves, or interviewing Canadians as he worked on his seemingly endless article.
    I’m not sure what the deal was with Canada—I guess they just have more wolf people there to interview.
    My mother called to wish me happy birthday and asked me to take the train to see her so she could give me her gift in person. She knew about Hunter and his birthday theories, because in a weak moment I had complained about it. And if there is one thing my mother, the former B-movie star, cannot understand, it’s putting up with something you don’t like.
    “Act like you have top billing or you’ll never get it,” she always said. “If I’d slunk around like you do, I’d still be ‘blond vampire girl number three.’ “
    But I have watched people’s faces as my mother launches into one of her tirades, and I think there may be worse things than slinking around dissatisfied. In any case, I said I would try to visit her next weekend. My father called next and told me he’d sent a check, because he wasn’t sure what I needed. He spent a while telling me about his girlfriend’s crazy ex-husband, and then told me to come visit soon. He didn’t mention Hunter.
    I knew my work friends wouldn’t call me, as they would see me tomorrow. I had lost touch with my college and high school friends; funny how you never see that in movies—the heroine always has at least two close childhood friends, each a little fatter or crazier than herself. Sometimes there’s a third, a gay man who is smarter, more stylish, and underneath more tragic than the rest. I wished for such sidekicks. I wondered if you could put in a personal ad: Straight woman seeks gay man, straight women, for walks in the park, foreign films, impromptu make overs, well-chosen gifts. No secret competitors, annual migrators, or disappearing acts need apply.
    Or maybe what I needed was a dog. Dogs don’t wake up one morning and realize that the relationship isn’t working for them anymore. Dogs don’t lie about what they’ve been doing, or leave you to go explore other options. Like their wolfish cousins, dogs love for life.
    Feeling maudlin, I decided to go for a long walk by the boat basin in Riverside Park, to get my endorphins flowing and work the wobble out of my thighs.
    “I’m going out,” I told Hunter.
    “Aah,” he replied, looking briefly in my general direction. Once out the door, I found it hard to move my legs very quickly. I contemplated taking a bus to the park, but then convinced myself that the urge to move would take hold once I got my feet near some grass.
    A few runners passed me on Riverside Drive, looking lean and serious in skintight Lycra while I churned along in my gray sweat suit. A businessman with a plastic bag on his left hand waited for his mastiff to defecate. It’s moments like these that make me love the city so much: Nowhere else is the natural made to seem so unnatural.
    On Seventy-ninth I met a woman I’d gone to high school