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

asking him to leave his patient bleeding on the table. Swallowing my annoyance, I opened up a bottle of Merlot.
    I glanced up when Hunter pushed his chair back from the computer and shambled over to the dinner table, his mind clearly a thousand miles away.
    “Okay, then, I’m here,” he said, reading over a page of notes before laying it on the couch. “What’s for dinner?”
    I served him his chili, so intent on concealing any hint of my own hurt and irritation that the first hint I had of Hunter’s hurt and irritation was when he shoved his bowl away with such force that it skidded off the table and bounced against the living room wall.
    For a moment, I just stared at the shattered pieces of pottery. Then I looked at my husband over the flame of a thick gold candle. “Mind telling me why you just did that?”
    Hunter gave a long, deflated sigh and then buried his face in his hands. He spoke without looking at me. “I don’t ask you to cook, Abra, but if you say you’re going to make me chili, then for God’s sake serve me something I can eat.”
    “You are aware that I’m a vegetarian?”
    Hunter’s head came up, and he stared at me from bloodshot eyes. “Are you aware that I am fucking not? You keep saying how thin and tired I look. How sick I am.” He snarled out the word “sick” like a curse, then gestured sarcastically to my bowl. “Here, babe, build up your strength with a nice, juicy, red tomato. Genetically modified and pesticide-filled, I might add.”
    I remained calm as Hunter got up, fumbled in his jacket pocket, and extracted a cigarette. I’d thought he’d quit over a year ago. On the exposed brick wall, the sauce was dripping slowly onto a woodcut of a hare.
    “Hunter, I don’t suppose you feel like telling me what’s really bothering you?”
    He dragged his hand through his hair. “It’s just all this sitting in the apartment day after day, trying to write about nature. I’m a fucking prisoner of the Upper West Side.”
    “Then why don’t you go out more?”
    He paused as if weighing his reply against my stupidity. “Abra, I’m writing about wilderness. And yes, I know I can take a walk in Central Park, but somehow after spending the summer in the Carpathian Mountains, crossing a grid of Gap stores and concrete to get to a sliver of toddler-infested grass is not as exciting as it once was.”
    I looked at him with what he called my nun’s face. “So you’re tired of living in Manhattan, and you decide to let me know by throwing your dinner at the wall?”
    “I didn’t throw it.” Hunter shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled.
    “I’d rather you didn’t do that in here.”
    “It tastes like shit anyway.” He ground his Marlboro out on the butter plate.
    “Don’t ruin the butter,” I said, “just because you don’t like dairy products.”
    “Christ, I’ve got to get out of this place. I’m dying in here, Abra, can’t you see that?”
    The stick of pale yellow butter was coated with dark ash, a crooked spear sticking out of its side. Why did I even care about that now? My hands were shaking, so I let them hold each other. “Get out of here? Do you mean out of the marriage?”
    Hunter examined the palms of his hands as if he could read his own lifeline. “Maybe. I don’t know. I need something to change.”
    I felt my face crumple, then got it back under control. “Okay, so something in your life needs to change, and you don’t know exactly what it is yet. Okay. If something’s bothering you, we need to talk about it. Is it the writing? Or did something happen on the—” He was getting his jacket out of the closet before the word “trip” had left my mouth.
    “I’m sorry, Abs,” he said as he left, “but I just can’t do this now.”
    I leaned against the open door for support. “Are you leaving me?”
    “Don’t read more into this than there is.”
    Suddenly I wished I had bought one of those self-help books with multiple