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

with in the suburbs. She told me she was writing plays and designing software. She had perfect toes in strappy sandals, and her stomach bulged with chic, designer-sweatered pregnancy.
    “Are you married?” she asked me, not waiting for a reply. “I just married a lovely man from a small village in Italy. I can’t tell you how happy we are. We got married in the little white church where Paolo was christened and the whole town turned out, all the young girls wearing ribbons. I remember you used to say you weren’t going to get married. I always imagined you’d wind up in a big, funky apartment with a lot of cats.”
    “No,” I said slowly, “that’s my mother. I prefer dogs.”
    Mrs. Small Village in Italy threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, that’s what I remember about you, Abra. Your killer sense of humor. Let’s get together for dinner sometime soon. Here’s my number.”
    I stuffed her card into a pocket and continued walking, passing young lovers in faded jeans, laughing and talking animatedly, their faces turned to each other.
    On the way back, I shopped for dinner at the health food store, where I saw a woman in her fifties with stark black hair and oversized tinted glasses. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her until she ran up and hugged me, explaining that she was my father’s old girlfriend Rita, and she hadn’t seen me since I’d been in college, and how was the old man.
    “He’s doing all right.”
    “Is he with someone? He’s always got to be with someone, your father.”
    “He’s with someone.”
    She shook her head. “I just have no respect for people who have to be in a relationship at any cost.”
    Rita embraced me again, enveloping me in strong perfume. She gave me her card in case I needed a job or some public relations, and then she finally left me free to examine the onions.
    The problem with Manhattan is, everyone comes here eventually—all your old friends, enemies, lovers, demons. People you met on vacation in Nepal will wind up beating you out for a taxi. The bully who called you “Dog Breath” all through first grade will turn up at your local diner, and will remember you didn’t come to his sixth birthday party, which is where the whole trouble began. Don’t come to the big city to become anonymous. New York is like Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West turns out to be the lady who didn’t like your dog back in Kansas.
    Back in the safety of my own apartment, with no one to remind me of my failings as a human and as a wife, I prepared dinner while Hunter remained focused on what ever he was writing. Because of the roiling uneasiness building inside of me, I chopped and mixed and measured with more care than usual, the way I did back in high school when I was first teaching myself to cook. Our kitchen was really a windowless nook, and from time to time I found myself gazing out into the living room. I tried not to look at the taut, defended posture of Hunter’s back as he brooded over his words.
    When there was nothing more to do with the vegetarian chili, I made my way through four sections of The New York Times waiting to see if Hunter would finish up what he was doing, but at three o’clock he was still hard at work, so I decided to take myself off to the bookstore. I returned from Barnes & Noble at seven (having glanced through a few titles in the Help, My Marriage Is Dying section at the exact moment our next-door neighbors strolled by, arm in arm, with books on gardening and Tuscany).
    “Want some wine, Hunter?” I said to the back of his head.
    “Mm.”
    “Red or white?”
    “What ever.”
    “Or should I just put out some blotter acid?”
    “Hah, very funny.”
    “So you are listening.”
    Hunter looked up from his computer, and I was reminded of a dog guarding its bone. “I’m almost done,” he said. “Two more sentences and then I can take a break.”
    You would think, from his tone, that he was closing up after an arduous surgery and I was